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DIVINATIONS 
AND CREATION 



BY HORACE HOLLEY 

DIVINATIONS AND CREATION 

READ -ALOUD PLAYS 

THE DYNAMICS OF ART 

BAHAISM 

THE SOCIAL PRINCIPLE 

THE INNER GARDEN 

THE STRICKEN KING 



DIVINATIONS 

AND 

CREATION 



BY 

HORACE HOLLEY 




MITCHELL KENNERLEY 
NEW YORK : MCMXVI 



0^- A 



-^<3^^'i, ^ 



^l. 



COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY 
MITCHELL KENNERLEY 



MAR 17 19(7 



PRINTED IN AMERICA 



'CI.A455920 



Certain of these poems having already appeared in 
Poetry, Forum, Smart Set, New Republic, Others, 
Poetry Journal, Evening Sun, Poetry Review, Manchester 
(England) Playgoer, Masses, International, and the New 
Freewoman, acknowledgments and thanks are rendered 
their respective editors for permission to use the poems in 
this collection. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

FOREWORD » 

DIVINATIONS 

RENAISSANCE 3 

THE SOLDIERS 4 

HERTHA 5 

FLIGHT 6 

LIFE 7 

EGO 8 

PAYSAGE D'AME 9 

DURING A MUSIC lo 

NEW YORK " 

TOTEM 12 

HOME 13 

EPIGRAMS H 

A PETAL i6 

CREATIVE n? 

THE ORCHARD i8 

THE SEER 19 

THE PRINCE 2o 

PAGANS 21 

CROSS PATCH 22 

CONFESSION 31 



CONTENTS 






PAGE 


THE MEETING 


32 


MASTERS OF ALL 


41 


ELEKTRA 


4Z 


IN A BOOK OF POEMS 


43 


POSTSCRIPT TO THE NEW TESTAMENT 


44 


SHE 


46 


DIALOGUE 


47 


TO CERTAIN AMERICANS 


48 


FEAR 


49 


INVOCATION 


50 


DIVINATIONS 


51 


MYSTIC 


54 


RAIN 


55 


VISION 


56 


HIGHWAY 


57 


G. B. S. & CO. 


58 


THE IDIOT 


59 


THESE WERE 


61 


IMAGES D'AMOUR 


6a 


LOVERS 


72 


TO A DANCER 


90 


VICTORY 


91 


ILLUMINATION 


92 


CREATION 




DEDICATION 


97 


THE VISION 


99 


THE WELL BELOVED 


lOI 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

IN A FACTORY 104 

IN A CAFE. I 105 

IN A CAFE, n 106 

A GAUGUIN 107 

A PASTEL 108 

LES MORTS 109 

MYTH no 

VALE 112 

ENGLAND 113 

THE PLAIN WOMAN 114 

EVERYMAN 115 

THE LONELY CUP 116 

SKYSCRAPERS 117 

HOMEWARD 118 

THE DANCE 119 

THE CROWD 121 

THE EGOIST 123 

THEY 124 

HERTHA 126 

THE GIRL 127 

THE ENCOUNTER 128 

THE BLUE GIRL 129 

EVE'S LAMENT 130 



EVE 



133 



GHOSTS 134 

EVE'S DAUGHTER 135 

LOVE 136 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

SOULS , 137 

THE DREAMER 138 

O BRUTES AND DREAMERS! 139 

REVEILLE 141 

BEFORE A GAUGUIN 142 

THE HILL 143 

AN OLD PRAYER RESAID 145 

IN THE MIRROR 146 

PILGRIM 147 

PARADOX 151 

FRAGMENT 152 

JANUS 154 

CREATOR 156 

CREATION 158 

ECSTASY 160 

GOAL 161 



DIVINATIONS 



FOREWORD 

^^r\ THAT I be 

^^ As oak to the carver's knife, or tougher stone, 
A moveless monolith 
Scored deep with secret hieroglyphs 
Whence men will slowly, letter by letter, spell 
Enduring exultation for their lives! 
For I am witness to a miracle 
That opens a new mad mouth 
Quick with astonishment of ardent words 
Not mine but prophets to this wonder 
That must be testified all new and strange 
And ere it stale be kneaded in our clay, 
Since memory would betray what must remain 
Ever before us like tomorrow. 
Of myself 

I should not otherwise heap words 
Upon the garbage of our daily gossip, 
But let you pass unbailed 
Myself preferring to slip within a dream 
Like a stretched lily in its quiet pool." 



RENAISSANCE 

/'^NCE more, in the mouths of glad poets, 

^^^ Words have become 

Terrible. 

An energy has seized and ravished them "^ 

Like a young lover, 

And they are pregnant. 

Their sound is the roaring of March tempests; 

Their meaning stabs the heart 

Like the dagger thrust flashing from a dancer's sleeve. 

Terrible and stark are words 

Once more, 

Risen from the deeps of eternal silence. 

New gods and fruitfuller races 

Chant 

Jubilant behind them! 



THE SOLDIERS 

{An Impression of Battle) 

WJ HOM I long since had known, 

' * Long since forgotten ; 
Who cast their names behind them like a dream, 
Like stagnant water spitting 
Their tasteless souls away; 
These are the soldiers, 
The nameless, the changelings. 
Monstrous with slow tormenting Number, 
Pestilent with unremitting Machine. 

Soldiers . . . 

These are they whom I suspected, guilty and glorious, 

Crouching in my own thought's background. 

Released by the whirlwind of fate 

To move as winds that scream about the Pole, 

As darkness of sea-depths. 

As meeting of ice and flame. 

Priests of the mystic sensual death, 

When shall they return ? 

When shall they return, broken, from Hell? 

The fuse of a thousand years has burned: 
Lord, quicken the groping hands of tomorrow! 



HERTHA 

SHE will grow 
Beautiful. 
Beauty will come to her 
Given, like sun and rain; 
Will go from her 
Freely, like laughter. 
She will be 

Centre, circumference to a great joy 
Swiftly passing, repassing 
Like water in and from a limpid well. 
She is of the new generation, new; 
Torch for the flame of passion, 
Flame for the torch of love. 

She will grow 

Beautiful. 

No, beauty itself vj'xW grow 

Like her. 



FLIGHT 

AS sky to the hawk's wing be 
O Life, for me! 
Space yielding space and height compelling height, 
To poise and free 
The ardor of my flight! 
Give me the sky 
Of the hawk's wing, Life! 
And does a Voice reply: 
" To the hawk's wing ... to the hawk's wing, 
Sky " f 



LIFE 

TO thrust back the hard, sleek water 
With toil of body, 
Spitting the bitter salt from the mouth ; 
Eyes just raised over 
The heaving surface; 

To sleep, captive of creeping tide and strangling billow; 
Unable ever to stand upright in the stature of God — 
The toil, the mystery, the danger! 
At last sucked in by the hard, sleek, creeping water. 



EGO 

A SOUL of long-enduring silences, 
In me 
The ancient demons 
Carved from Egyptian terror 
Brood again, 

High-throned above ten thousand pillars 
Where the years 
Break, like bilious of sand ; 
Who sleep 

Watchful behind lidless eyes 
That men may call them sleepless; 
Who speak 
Seldom, 
As words scored in tough, incredulous stone. 



PAY SAGE D'AME 

BUT there's a desert moment in the soul 
All dry, all level, all monotony; 
As if it were the bed of some lost stream 
Or shore to salt, forgotten inland lakes 
That stormed a way with waves, then died to sand, 
Salt, glittering sand, interminable and mad. 
In this spot or in that where one lies down 
At last too reconciled, 

The stretched, black tongue is just as far from speech; 
And nowhere can the finger, trembling out, 
Stab the escaped horizon. 

Never, never and never who loves the world away 
Loves one day back. 



s 



DURING A MUSIC 



HARP barbs of many arrows 
Sped suddenly from the ambush of old sorrow 



Transfix us; 

Now the company, hypocritic, 

Bleeds in its anguish of passion — 

St. Stephen! 

Redeemed by the arrows! 



lo 



NEW YORK 

{By an "artist refugee") 

'to NICKER between convulsive screams of war, 

^ Fate, that snickered of old 
Gloating to watch i^neas and his race 
Orphaned from golden Troy; 
Ulysses too, 

No luckier, tossed upon the trackless ocean — 
Snicker once more 

And goad the gods against our wished return. 
We, homeless as they. 
Thrust forth from that same rage renewed 
P rom Troys re- wasted 

And cast upon this half-spawned isle where seized us 
A worse-than-Cyclops ! 
Snicker that we are prisoned in such cave, 
(Few, few will be the stern survivors 
Winning the dream beyond or the dream forsaken!), 
Vet, as you bend to gloat, see! written 
In smoke and blood our hearty scorn of Cyclops, 
Homeric epigram damning the isle forever: 
Sting of beehive, strife of antheap, stupor of graveyard. 



II 



TOTEM 

THE lake in utter liquid silence 
Mirrored the sky; 
In utter granite silence rose about 
Mountain on mountain, colored like a flame 
And flaunting all seasons to the single view ; 
Mountain and lake, and wood and cloudy snow 
Barred thrice against my spirit — 
They conversed 

With whomsoever knew their native tongue, 
A mystic murmur eloquent, to me 
Silence oppressive; and I stood 
A stranger, subtly hated, in the land. 
It seemed the world turned inside out, 
I outside, banished, banned, feeling 
Beyond the wall were secrets spelling life. 
Strange image! Brutal wood! Tremendous form! 
Totem! Guardian god of long-forgotten souls! 
In you is locked the lost, the ancient tongue. 
The language intimate, wooed from lake and mountain 
In you, strange silent thing, 
America! 



HOME 

NOW as from a long arduous journey 
Have I returned 
Homeward within myself 

And loose from aching shoulder the pressing straps, 
And lay my burden down, my wisdom. 
Content with home. 
In this small garden I see 

Meeting and mingling, fused to familiar things. 
The strange glamor that beckoned across star-lit desert. 
The passionate freedom that heaved within the ocean. 
The glory of marble cities and marching men. 

May I be local as a tree or hill. 
Which no man moves in his imagination. 



13 



EPIGRAMS 



CAN I outwatch a fixed, unwinking star? 
Can I outwait the calm Millennium? 
Speak from that starry silence which you are ; 
Yield me your heart's lone heaven — come, O come! 



Unfold for men, O God, love's true, creative day 
To flower our barren lives by mellow rain and noon : 
The glory of old thought is still, and cold, and gray, 
Like gardens unrenewed beneath the sterile moon. 



Whate'er our love vouchsafe, men's praise and blame 

fall hollow, 
A voice upon the winds that drown it as they blow: 
So fair a vision led our thought was all to follow; 
So strong a passion urged our will was all to go. 



Love Cometh to the proud as a strong wind upon little 
ships, 
Confounding them; 
Unto the meek it cometh as April to the wayside, 
Scattering joy. 

14 



EPIGRAMS 15 

5 

111 health — the heart's unseen Gethsemane ; 
111 health — the mind's unknown insanity; 
111 health — a prison round the spirit built 
Darker than Judas' sin, than kaiser's guilt! 

6 

A dead leaf has fallen in the forest, 
And that is my past suffering; 
A drop of rain is lost within the sea, 
And that is my old desire. 

7 
With slow, deliberate hands 
I carve my secret 

On cliff, on shattered stone, on ancient wall, 
Letter by letter. 
Arduous, firm. 



A PETAL 

' I ''HE garden is drenched with dew, 
-■■ Each drop has captured the dawn; 
Suns purple and gold gleam through 
From myriad blades on the lawn. 
The trees, long rooted in gloom 
Where slumberous Winter has been, 
Skyward toss branches abloom 
Like dancers glad to begin. 



i6 



CREATIVE 

Ty ENEW the vision of delight 

-'•^ By vigil, praise and prayer 

Till every sinew leaps in might 

And every sense is fair: 

Beyond the soul's most stagnant dread 

A full tide drives its foam 

Where life, with golden sails outspread, 

Is one glad voyage home. 



17 



THE ORCHARD 

I STOOD within an orchard during rain 
Uncovering to the drops my aching brow -^— 

wondrous fancy, to imagine now 

1 slip, with trees and clouds, the social chain, 
At one with nature, naught to lose or gain 
Nor even to become; no, just to be 

My being's self and essence wholly free 

From needs that mold the heart to forms of pain. 

Arise, I cried, and celebrate the hour! 

Acclaim serener gladness ; if it fail 

New courage, nobler vision will survive 

That I have known my kinship to the flower, 

My brotherhood with rain ; and in this vale 

Have been a moment's friend to all alive. 



i8 



THE SEER 

WHO must fare alone tonight 
Underneath the stormy skies, 
Who must wait the morning light 
Patient, alone, with fearless eyes? 
The Seer, the Singer, 
The Heaven-bringer, 
Patient, alone, with fearless eyes. 

Who must leave his kin, and roam 

Past the bourn of farthest wind ; 

Who must make the world his home. 

Glad of the crust the beggars find? 

The Seer, the Singer, 

The Heaven-bringer, 

Glad of the crust the beggars find. 

" Who was it came, who was it went ? 

Ere we could speak he passed along. 

He filled our hearts with wonderment: 

We know him not, but hear his song." 

The Seer, the Singer, 

The Heaven-bringer, 

We know him not, but hear his song! 



19 



THE PRINCE 

"•' I ^HE world's proud head has shaken down 

A As from a burden free 
The splendor of his ancient crown, 

His golden royalty, 
And with his broken sceptre, flings 
The glory and the faith of kings. 

" The throne that Time prepared for him 

Within a solemn court 
Settles in ruin mild and dim ; 

And there no more resort 
Power, justice, mercy, whom his face 
Once touched with stern, superior grace. 

" The sacred majesty of law 

Goes dressed in common weed ; 
Authority, once hedged with awe. 

Men hire to serve their need ; 
All attributes of royal worth 
In exile scatter through the earth. 

" O lest the world, with kings, o'erthrow 

Its own superior line. 
Before this vacant throne I vow 

One aim, one passion mine: 
To raise the King on high again 
And throne him in the hearts of men ! " 

20 



PAGANS 

CRAFTY, they come again, 
Pagans of heart and brain 
To seize with carefuUer art 
Our life in mind and heart; 
Who wasted the love we sold 
For image of brass and gold 
But now with words betray 
Our eager love today. 
Up, faith, and forward, vision! 
Ride wrath and drive derision 
Among their tongues, to break 
Riddle and rhyme they make 
Lest we be taken in shames. 
Netted in numbers and names! 
Riddle and rhyme and spell — 
Crafty, who sing so well. 



21 



CROSS PATCH 

HER ardent spirit fled beyond her years 
As light before a flame. 
At fifteen, the tennis medal ; at sixteen, the golf cup ; 
Then, the coveted ! bluest of blue ribbons 
For faultless horsemanship. 
No man in all that country. 
Whatever his sport. 

But had to own the girl the better man. 
At that she merely smiled — saying that triumph 
Is all a matter of thrill: who tingles most, 
He wins inevitably. 
Half bewilderment, half jest, 
They called her Sprite, those ordinary folk 
Who thought such urge, such instinct of life to joy 
Was somehow mythical. 

And having named her, they no longer thought of her 
(To their relief) as young or old, one sex or other — 
Just herself, apart, a goddess of outofdoors. 
Certainly school boys never dreamed of her tenderly 
As one to send a perfumed valentine; 
But when she strode among the horses in the field 
They pawed the ground. 
No leash could hold a dog when she passed by. 
Then, despite her ardent race with time — 
Ardent as though each moment were a dare 
To some adventure of freed muscle and thrilled nerve — 
A fleeter runner overtook her flight 

22 



CROSS PATCH 23 

And bound her tightly in a golden net, 

Hands, feet and bosom; lips and hair and eyes: 

Beauty, beauty of women. 

Or was it she, unconscious what she raced, 

Ran suddenly, breathless, glad and yet dismayed, 

Into the arms of her own womanhood? 

Which, no one knew, herself the least of all. 

But no more did she fly beyond herself 

As anxious to leave the very flesh behind, 

But lingered with it in deep and rapturous content ; 

Her ardor turned 

Henceforth within upon a secret goal. 

Spirit and beauty seemed to flow together, 

Each rapt in each 

Like a hushed lily in a hidden pool. 

Only at dances did the sprite peep out. 

Ardent and yet controlled, 

Alive to every turn and slope of the rhythm 

As if the music spread a path for her 

To what she truly sought. 

'Twas at a dance she found it — found the man — 

And no one had to question what she found : 

Her eyes, her very fingertips proclaimed 

The marvel it was to be a part of her, 

A part of love. 

The man — he had no medals and ribbons of triumph ; 

If she had fled on horse or even on foot 



24 CROSS PATCH 

He never could have caught her. 

It must have been his mind's humility 

That made her stay, 

So thoughtless of itself, so thoughtful of 

Forgotten wisdoms, old greatness, world glories, 

A patient, slow, but never-yielding search 

(Passionate too, with wings' flight of its own) 

For what — compared with other minds she knew — 

Might well have seemed the blessed Western isles. 

They lived beyond the village on a hill 

Beneath a row of pines: a house without pretense 

Yet fully conscious of uncommon worth — 

A house all books inside. 

Their only neighbor was a garrulous man 

Who smoked a never-finished pipe 

Beside a never-finished woodpile 

Strategically placed against the road 

So none could pass without his toll of gossip. 

He started it. 

One day, pointing his thumb across the pines, he said 

" Something's wrong up yonder; 

Their honeymoon has set behind a storm. 

I heard 'em fight last night . . . 

Well, what'd he expect? They're all alike — ivomen. 

Of course it got about. 

And while no one quite believed, 

Still, to make sure some friendly women called. 



CROSS PATCH 25 

They said that he was studying, quite as usual, 

Not changed at all, just quiet and indrawn — 

The last man in the world to make a quarrel — 

And she, well, of course, she wasn't so easy to read, 

Always strange and different from a child, 

But even in her the sharpest eye saw nothing 

That seemed the loose end of the littlest trouble. 

No couple could have acted more at ease; 

And anyhow, a woman like that, they said. 

Would never have stayed so quiet behind the pines 

With real unhappiness, but tossed it broadcast 

Like brands against the burning of the world. 

She said the house was damp — and that was all. 

At last even the old garrulous woodpile 

Knocked out those ashes and refilled his pipe. 

Then, a few months later, a frightened servant girl 

Ran out at early morning from the pines 

Crying the judge in town. 

She said her mistress suddenly, without cause. 

Standing beside her in the kitchen, turned on her 

Blackly a moment, with words no decent girl deserved, 

Then struck her full in the face, spat on her, pulled her 

hair. 
She wanted damages, the servant did. 
Yes, and a clean character before the world — 
That is, if the woman wasn't mad. 
Mad! Oh ho! the shock of it 



26 CROSS PATCH 

Rolled seething over the place like a tidal wavc, 

And in the wake of the wave, like weed and wreckage, 

Many a hint and sense of something wrong at the pines 

Sprawled in the daylight. 

A stable boy remembered 

How not a week before she'd called for a horse, 

The spiritedest saddle they had, 

And when she brought him back 'twas late at night, 

The horse and woman both done up. 

Slashed, splashed and dripping; 

But all she said was send the bill; 

The beast's no good; Til never ride again. 

So this and other stories quite as strange 

Stretched everybody's nerves for the trial to come, 

And made them angry when it didn't come. 

He settled with the girl outside of court. 

The judge's wife knew all there was to know: 

Not jealousy at all, just nerves — 

Every woman, you know, at a certain time . . . 

Of course, agreed the village, so that's it? still 

(Not to be cheated outright) still. 

Even so, she'd best take care that temper — 

A husband's one thing, an unborn child's another — 

She'd always been a stormy, uncontrollable soul. 

Some blamed the husband he had never reined her in, 

Most pitied him a task impossible. 

All awaited the event on tiptoe — 



CROSS PATCH 27 

It wasn't like other women, somehow, for her to have a 

child. 
No child was born. 
Then other women sneered: 

" She wanted one, and couldn't — served her right." 
This lapse from the common law of women 
Was all the fissure the sea required 
To force the dike with ; little by little, 
The pressure of year on year. 
The pines and the two lives they hid 
Grew dubious, then disagreeable, at last sinister. 
At this point the new generation took up 
Its inheritance, the habit of myth. 
And quite as matter of course it found her hateful, 
Ugly, a symbol of sudden fear by darkened paths, — 
Cross Patch/ 

And one by one the people who were young 
Beside her youth, moved off or died or changed. 
Forgetting her youth as they forgot their own, 
Until if ever she herself 
Had felt a sudden overwhelming pang 
To stop some old acquaintance on the road 
And stammer out " You know, don't you ? the girl I 

was — 
I was not always this, was I ? " she might have met 
A dozen at most to know the Sprite her youth, 
But none to clear the overtangled path 



28 CROSS PATCH 

That led from Sprite to Cross Patch — not one, not one 

But looking back would damn 

The very urge of joy in Sprite, and all its ardor, 

For having mothered Cross Patch — not one, not one 

To see the baffled womanhood she was; 

Orphan of hopes too bright, not mother of wrong. 

And thus besieged on all sides by the present 

Against all sides she fought, as if by fury 

To force one way to yield. 

For both it was a nightmare, not a life, and neither 

Could well have told how it had ever begun, 

But once begun it seemed inevitable, 

A storm that settled darkly round their souls, 

Unwilled as winter 

With moan of wind through sere and barren boughs 

And skies forever masked. 

The first blow of the quarrel had been hers, 

A blow unguessed of either, for she struck 

Like nature, not to hurt but to survive; 

But wrath accrued 

So soon thereafter that the blow seemed angry, 

And she struck out again with eyes and tongue, 

Pursuing him, the angrier at his grief. 

Until in sheer defence he struck 

Not at herself but at her blows, to ward them. 

Keeping the while 

His thought above the dark upon a star or so 



CROSS PATCH 29 

Fixed in the past; but she defended her wrath 

As dignified and right — they stormed 

Up, up the hill and down, 

Increasing darkness to the end of life. 

Friends said of him 

He seemed like a lonely sentinel 

Posted against the very edge of doom. 

Whom no watch came relieving. 

"She'll kill him yet; the fool!" the woodpile's verdict 

Before the pipe went out for the last time 

Leaving the pines unneighbored. 

But he was wrong, the urn outlasted the flame. 

One night, hands at her throat, she came 

And knelt before him, timidly looking up 

And trying to speak, to speak — struggling as if words 

Were something still to learn. 

At last speech broke from her, so agonized 

He hardly knew if it were supreme wrath or supreme 

supplication : 
" You did not love ine . . . ." 
And as he bent to her he felt 
Her girlhood cry, a murdered thing returned. 
He hoped that it was wrath, as easier to endure. 
Feeling it burn from mind to heart, from heart to soul. 
Gathering more terror, more awe, at each advance. 
Like a priest with sacrifice it passed 
The colonnades of his thought, entering without pause 



30 CROSS PATCH 

An unknown altar of his being 

Behind a curtain never moved before. 

" You did not love me . . . ." 

Both gazed upon the sacrifice held up 

As though it were the bleeding heart of God. 

And then the priest returned, slowly, pace by pace 

Out of the hush of feeling into the hush of thought. 

It was the priest and not himself, the man believed, 

Who like an echo, not less agonized, 

Whispered across the waste of many lives. 

Whispered " No . . . ." 

Whose heart, the man's or woman's, lowest stooped 

To raise the other, prostrate heart aloft 

With supplication and consolement, urging it 

To live, O live! — dying itself the while, 

God knew before the beginning of the world. 

We only know that stooping so, dust turned to dust, 

All hearts meet at last. 



CONFESSION 

44'' I '•HE first hour with her, even the first, 

1 I felt 
A leaf in some lone forest crisp and fall. 
A wiser man were warned. 
I stayed ; 

And straightway, like a strange eclipse, 
All things lost luster in her presence. 
Lost luster, darkening — days, events, and I. 
And still I was not warned. 
Yet, in my new remorse 

(What else but I the knife that tortured her?) 
I asked — why had I changed ? 
What hardened, what edged my heart, 
What drove it home? 
No will of mine. 

Then, as the darkness thickened and grew mad, 
Walling us two in one close coffin 
(A cenotaph, I said!), 

The brooding whisper I meant became a scream 
And suddenly from that terror lightning broke 
Our sunless worlds apart; and she was gone. 
And she was gone. 

Now, as I turn from the world's reproach 
Seared like the fields against the new seeds' sowing, 
One thing I say of that mad winter — 
One thing, the last: 
" Poor child ... 

She was the tragedy . . . before it came." 

31 



THE MEETING 

INDEED, it was no ordinary night 
But gloomed by rain and riven by the light 
Of reckless, crashing clouds that seemed to meet 
As ships along the rivers of the street — 
A night when hearts like lonely ships would fly 
The burden of their ocean and their sky. 
And as from storm-beridden voyage end 
At last within the harbor of a friend. 
Yet I was ordinary, unelate; 
I felt no rendezvous that night with fate; 
And had I not made promise, rain or fine. 
To meet with friends at a new place to dine. 
Had much preferred to idle home instead 
And take my romance, second hand, in bed. 
Arrived, by this time awed and silent too, 
I gladly lost myself among the few 
Already met, whose speech roofed out the storm, 
Whose laughter lit the room and made it warm. 
Well I remember yet the corner where 
I tilted in a small, uneasy chair. 
But cannot now recall a single word 
Of all I might have said or might have heard, 
For through my thoughts as through a broken pane 
Somehow the darkness drifted and the rain .... 
A later guest moved in beside me soon. 

I laughed: "There is between us but one spoon." 

32 



THE MEETING 33 

"O that's a custom here; each takes his turn." 

I looked at her. ... I saw the candles burn 

Brighter along the pleating of her hair 

And round it glory such as legends wear ; 

Her eyes, a moment shown, were suns gone down 

To twilight of a meditative brown ; 

Her age ... it seemed like some rare trophy hung 

Between two victories. And then my tongue 

Like an old harp of long-forgotten tone 

Awoke to sudden music, not its own — 

Music in which her speech and silence blent 

The throb of a responsive instrument. . . . 

" And yet how strange it is," I said at last ; 

" How strange ... a something through my heart has 

passed 
These very moments, something that would speak 
Within my words, my thoughts, willing but weak. 
It seems to come from some dim long ago." 

"So soon?" she murmured. " Give it voice and knoiv." 

" Well, as I may. . . . It's like a telephone 
That brings incredible leagues of whispered tone. 
Or like a drama, shadowy but real. 



34 THE MEETING 

Of some one's life replayed for me to feel — 
A life that reaches hither from the dead." 

" Draw closer, closer whom it is," she said. 

" There ! now it's clear, no farther than a pace : 
I seem to stand with some one face to face — 
A woman, yes, a woman that I knew . . . 
But she's Egyptian!" — 

" What was she to youf " 

"What could she be? And yet . . . and yet, close by, 

I see a sleeping child — the child is I! 

I know him as I know the yesteryear 

My memory keeps in sight or odour here 

More intimate than things I touch and see; 

I know him as a very part of me, 

A path retrodden and a gate unbarred. 

By him I know the woman. ... It is hard 

To keep these selves apart, so close we seem ! " 

" O do not try. But is there more you dream?" 

" Yes, yes, that life unwinds itself again 
With all its scenes of different times and men, 



THE MEETING 35 

And round each act, each passion, every mood. 
One essence clings, that woman's motherhood . . . 
A motherhood so urgent yet so mild 
It made my spirit lonely as a child, 
As one forever homesick, to return 
Somewhere, sometime, to her " — 

"And still you yearn f* 

" Perhaps .... Great beauty makes me lonely still 

As though her passion worked upon my will. 

In her as in a garden I was sown ; 

Her heart was like a far horizon thrown 

About the goings and comings of my heart, 

From whom my blindest path could not depart. 

I was the empty cup, and she the wine — 

How have I thought my being wholly mine? 

I'd thank her now, but she alas is dead." 

" J re you so sure? What of yourself? " she said. 

" O you are right! I am no longer sure 

Of what things perish and what things endure . . . 

And yet one thing tonight I'm certain of: 

A woman without her I could not love ! " 

" But there were other women — can you see? " 



36 THE MEETING 

" Yes, many others whom confidingly 

I gave the candle of my life to light ; 

Dimly I feel them, not like her, tonight. 

Not dimly, no, with very pang renewed 

I live again one hour, become one mood : 

It was the evening of the day she died — 

Too late the message brought me to her side — 

And seeing her unresponsive, in decay, 

Thin, sere, the orphan of her opulent day, 

I prayed beside her, stricken to the bone. 

In anguish wrestling with all grief alone . . . 

When underneath my sight a new sight burned 

Than saw, unspoiled, the tender one returned, 

Yes! somehow lovelier, somehow purer gold 

While unbelievably shrunk, incredibly old." 

" The grief of love is beauty's faithful glass." 

" The one I love, her glory would not pass . . . 
How strange, to walk this night among the dead ! " 

" The dead are walking this night in us! " she said. 

" Surely! and many, many are the feet 
I hear return ; many the hearts that beat 
Against my heart to enter and to tell 
Forgotten secrets." 



THE MEETING 37 

" Listen, listen well! " 

" A comet that through time's prodigious black 

Moved to the ends of heaven then journeyed back, 

From death to birth I sped, quickened by will 

That gave me motion: death and time stand still . . . 

Once more I lived, with altered race and name, 

With altered thoughts but in my soul the same — 

The soul, that music whose innumerable strings 

I hear tonight, echoes of echoings 

All gathered in one sound as if I stood 

Within the ear of God." 

'' Tonight you would! " 

" The life whose orbit now dips nearest me, 
It seems, but how to tell? it seems to be 
Open to love as it was open before, 
But on love's other side . . . ." 

"You loved HER more?" 

"Her? . . . Yes, I feel a woman's presence near — ^ 
How could you guess? and thoughts more strangely dear, 
More intimate, than I had ever known 
Even in former lives . . . as if I'd grown 
Ready for this new love in all my lives." 



38 THE MEETING 

" You loved this woman, then, as men their wives? " 

"Ah no! It was a daughter I adored! 

Her groping hands and heart in me unstored 

An unsuspected world of brooding awe; 

Of miracle, a law behind our law; 

Of passion's best desire resolved in clay. 

On her I labored as an artist may 

To manifest, before his dreams depart, 

The tense, creative longing of his heart. 

So then I felt . . . but now as I return 

Within that delicate fellowship, I learn 

How much I changed by her I thought to change. 

Her rapt young beauty — what on earth more strange 

Than this awakening in fatherhood 

Of something so maternal, yes, so good! — 

It strained the waters of my old desire 

And turned to light love's self-consuming fire." 

" You did not feel that older self of you? " 

" Not as by thoughts but as by dreams I grew 
Conscious of deeper soul and wider scheme . . . ." 

" But never of that mother did you dream?" 

" Never to be aware — yet once almost 



THE MEETING 39 

She lived again, a momentary ghost 
Invisible against the luminous day — 
A presence and a sign that slipped away 
While, guessing at myself, I guessed at her. 
She stood about the daughter like a blur — " 

"About the daughter?" 

" Yes. It was the hour 
Of my leavetaking. Silent with the power 
Of words I could not speak, of words turned tears — " 

" The pang that strangles yet across the years! " 

" As well as I she knew the words unsaid — " 

" How should a daughter not, the day she wed? " 

" Then round about her drew that other one 
In whom I felt the mother, me the son . . . 
I thought it was a new bride's hope confessed 
Of motherhood to be. But who had guessed? 
She spoke no word of whom or what returned ; 
For both alike unutterably I yearned . . ." 

" O self that to itself becomes a ghost! " 



40 THE MEETING 

" Tonight, so near them both ... I dare almost 
Believe that one and other were the same — 
Adorably one womanhood that came 
With beauty guarded thus, with love untold, 
A flame within my life to free its gold . . . ." 

" With love half told, invoking more delight . . . ." 

" With love half heard, half known — until tonight/ 

Over her yielded hands I bowed my head: 

" That I am you . . . that you are I! " we said. 



MASTERS OF ALL 

ROLLING alone, a soul that could not know 
The why of itself, the what and why of the sky, 
I labored with the slow blind moments 
To pile about the white flame-core of my life 
Dream upon dream, unconscious what they were; 
Which now as by intense geology 
Lie stratum on stratum, each an inadequate self 
Living its aeon of old frustrate desire 
But cumbrously, marvelously wrought 
Compact at last from core to disk, a shape 
Joining the harmonic motion of all worlds 
Until, aeons and aeons more of mute perfection, 
I found my sun, my season in the sky. 
Then lo! the disk thrust out a garden 
As on pavilions of old dream, 
Habitable and conscious — life: 
A little strip of being poised in the vast inane 
Wherein as Adam I walk in my own dawn 
And find you there as Eve, we two 
Masters of all. 



41 



ELEKTRA 

GLORY that you are 
I do not want you to be a glory; 
Are there not stars enough, and music, 
And words which at the turning of thought's long vistas 
Amaze the soul ? 
But I would have you near, 
Near as the beating of my heart, 
Near and familiar. 

Here upon my table your wrinkled glove, 
Your coat upon my chair. 

And ever your footsteps, ever your speech, ah near! 
For I would relearn this world looking through your 

eyes, 
And build the day anew upon your kisses. 
Its miracle the perfume of your presence. 
Your wrinkled glove and coat 
Sprawling beside me — they 

Would banish the mystic stars, and bring their glory 
Passionately down to wood and earth and stone 
All-glorious now for me, instinct with power 
To build a home about us — Paradise! 



42 



IN A BOOK OF POEMS 

FAITH cried of old that life fulfills in death, 
That heaven, not earth, was made the meetingplacc 
For dream and deed, for power and wisdom, grace 
Perfected as a new-born child with breath, 
As tongues with speech, eyes vision, hearts with blood. 
So faith foreknew and told, even in this dark 
Where every arrow seems to miss its mark, 
Each sacrifice its right of gratitude. 
But life's the mock of faith if life must die, 
And faith's the scourge of life if life must fear. 
Who spells the riddle ? How shall love fulfill ? 
But heaven and earth grow closer, here, O here 
For whoso die to self, as you and I, 
And, born to spirit, learn the spirit's will. 



43 



POSTSCRIPT TO THE NEW TESTAMENT 

{For the year 1916) 

6 4^^^ RANT them, in peace, their blustering argument; 
vJ Calm-souled, obey their mad and soulless will; 
Though it confirm their triumph and your ill, 
Follow their ways and live them through, content. 

" In all the world keep back no smallest plot 
Beyond their lust, even for an altar place — 
Nay, give them, with a lover's eager grace 
All things you have and are till you are not. 

" Build to the top each vaunting Babel tower 
Their pride appoints to overtake the sun, 
And, witnessing its doom or ere begun. 
Condemn your labor's limit, not their power. 

" Press first in every battle they deploy; 
Their murder multiply, their suicide; 
If they so bid, against yourselves divide: 
Loose as they will, and as they will, destroy. 

" Who questions them in aught, he questions Me. 
I am unquestionable. Me not oppose. 
By good and evil and by friends and foes 
I join the ends of My eternity. 

44 



POSTSCRIPT TO NEIV TESTAMENT 45 

" They seize the means: the end I hold above 
The frenzied schemes of their unwitting mind, 
Close, yet concealed, as sunlight from the blind. 
Be you the end : the end of all is love. 

" Be patient to the end, and do not grieve. 
Their to-and-fro is circled by My Power. 
I sowed the seeds their effort brings to flower — 
A paradise they know not, nor receive." 



SHE 

SHE is the ewe lamb I tend by the hills of devotion. 
She is the tigress I flee through the desert of shame. 
She is the tempest that shatters my rock in the ocean. 
She is the vision I follow, the path that I came. 



46 



DIALOGUE 

^'T IKE the god of a fountain, I knelt 
A-' Caressing the flow of your beauty 
Till, limpid as you, I entered 
The dominant whirlpool." 

" From the shadowy garden I gave you 
Fruits that were softer than flowers, 
Fruits of myself. 
These, O lover, are renewed." 



47 



TO CERTAIN AMERICANS 



"T LOOKED, and saw the doom, and turned to salt, 

^ Lot's wife, become a legendary woe 
Not well forgot by them who yet will show 
Extremity of fate for extreme fault. 
But you, worse disobedience, what shall halt 
Your more than backward gaze, your backward hope 
Relapsing from the decent task, to grope 
For gold, unearned, within a charnel vault? 
Know well, as souls have ampler light and wings 
God moves His people upward to the sky 
And dooms the bestial city of the plain ; 
Know well, whoever bestial would remain. 
They join the darkness of forbidden things: 
Which since you do, I pity, even I ! " 



48 



FEAR 

WITHIN my eyes the landscape sags 
Like sodden garments from a nail ; 
Voices and music shatter in my ears 
Like teacups in a trembling hand ; 
And faith, that was an eagle in the sun, 
Hangs like a bat, in darkness, upside down. 



49 



INVOCATION 

/^ GOD, who shattered every heart at last 
^-^ And every mind and body, unaghast 
Molding from spcnded hearts a purer heart, 
From weary minds a hopefuller mind, to start 
Renewed desire upon the way of love; 
O God, take all as Thou hast taken of 
My all so often ; yet before I turn 
Silent as earth and water, grant I burn 
One beacon in this cloudy world of strife! 
With all my life I reach to more than life — 
Yea, ere I mingle with anonymous earth 
Give me to spell this passion's passionate worth 
Upon some visible, lasting monument! 
Let not my rapture with my blood be spent. 
But seizing light and movement, ever stay 
A star against the dawn of perfect day. 



SO 



DIVINATIONS 



BLIND footprints treading the snow 
In crazy hieroglyphs: 
History . . . 
(For My beloved the snow lies white again!) 

2 

My beloved call one to another 

"There is no yesterday! 

" Memory, the fortune teller of souls, 

" Slinks from her broken tent 

" Fearing the storm." 

3 

My beloved cry 

" We move in a joyous Dream 

"Parted from all that is! 

" O God, Destroyer of paths that returned ! " 

4 
Know you not, beloved, 
I give you My sight 

That you may behold all ends as beginnings; 
My heart, 

That you may adore things living; 
And My memory. 
To know yourselves? 

SI 



52 DIVINATIONS 



Vainly in passionate arms you hold, 

Or snare in whisper's echo 

The strangers 

That move in a World a world apart, 

By paths that join you never. 



The shadow of hate turned stone, 
The image of scorn turned clay ; 
In the Seven Valleys of My will, beloved, 
The strangers perish! 



Over the gate of Death I carved in flame 

" Not adoring My beauty again 

" With these eyes ; 

" With this heart falling in love 

" No more." 

8 

None are the hieroglyphs within My court 
You shall not read, beloved, 
Save that yourselves have writ, 
Yourselves adoring! 



DIVINATIONS 53 

9 
Not in your eyes that look to hill and cloud, 
Nor in your hand plucking the yellow blossom 
Does Spring return, 
But in My radiant will 
That burns upon the winter of your heart! 
In this Season, 

Wherever the seeds of your endeavor strike, 
There is renewal. 

lO 

My beloved, 

I stand about you like a bright Horizon 

Burning with many suns; 

As flowers firmly rooted in the warm earth of Spring, 

You live in the midst of Me. 



MYSTIC 

HANDS grope for the strung bow, 
Feet for the open summit path, 
Eyes for the strange altar carving. 
Hands and feet tensely held, eyes closed, 
Daylong I stand under the rain 
Feeling a great power pouring, brimming my soul. 
Break bow, close path, hide carving: 
Here's all. 



54 



RAIN 

ON housetops lofty as thought 
The rain drips pelting down, the winter rain, 
Pelting and spattering, 
Driven from the austere windy north 
As if the skies would cleave 
To spew once more the forty days and nights 
Prodigious with pelting rain, 
And over these housetops lofty as thought. 
Over this city, | 

Roll waves of desolation ! 
O my people, unconscious! do you not listen? 
Do you not hear these messengers approach? 
Where is that open door, your soul, 
To give them entrance? 

Thrilling, invocative, with speech of God they speak. 
Conductors of truth, ripeners of seed, bringers of power. 
Which you avoid as chill tormenting rain! 
Nay, yourselves are chill tormenting rain 
Rolling like myriad drops 
Down gutters of nothingness. 
Sinking to hidden pools, forgotten and stagnant. 
Rolling, rolling forever 
A deluge 
Drowning the golden City, vision of God! 



55 



VISION 

IS there a crowd that rolls upon itself, 
A frantic, stuprous mob 
Headless and heartless? 
It is an arrow streaming to distant mark 
Fixed in the will of God. 
And are there darkened cities, 
Peoples sword-locked and closely crucified; 
Explosive passions, self-tormenting hates. 
Blindness of path and peak? 
They drive, all men, divided mobs and towns. 
Fort-girdled states, imperious continents — 
All men soever — moving to a goal 
Urged as these separate waters by one moon. 
They struggle, sleep ; they murmur, grieve or pray, 
Thoughtful and reckless, seeing, unseeing; entwined in 

bitter grasp 
Beyond partition into good and evil; 
Yet all, and not one conscious stream — 
All, all, the sere, the singing — 
Obey one urge, and each alike arrives. 
O fool that turns his back! 
Traitor that leagues the world to weak despair! 
He gropes against the rising of the sun. 
And dawn shall strike him speechless. 



56 



HIGHWAY 

PATHWAY of currents charged from rapid worlds 
Between immovable poles I stand 
Vibrant with forces joyous, conquering, 
That fly through every atom quick with birth. 
I am the highway of God, 
Trodden by radiant messengers, His will ; 
I am the tent where angels love to sleep. 
Dreaming of Love reborn. 



57 



G. B. S. esf CO. 

TOO late, masters of knowledge, you approach 
With open tomes, encyclopaedic acres 
Sown with the old world's wisdom! 
I have drunk 

The wine of love ... I dance 
And will not batten on this corn. 
Too late . . . 
Yet, O my masters, ye were the undertakers of great 

things, 
Yea, the pall bearers of a corpulent world 
Dead, dead forever. 



58 



THE IDIOT 

. . . Yes! 
But as for me, 

I pass without debate of life and death, 
Stumbling or dancing as the tune is pitched. 
Not choosing, not remembering. 
Dragging no chains and aiming for no star. 
I know who frowns and grudges: 
" Concentrate essence of inconstant moments, 
The flower's soul, the fool's way his! " 
And that may be. 
But ever I peer about 

Observing these anxious folk, these moderns, 
Tired Atlases who bear 

A world of borrowed marble and stolen fame — 
I peer about, and ever as I pass 

Touch softly each gleaming pillar, each smoking shrine 
And unperceived, drop tears upon them. 
Tears . . . 

For men are sleepers in a world of dream, 
An unreal, staggering world 
That any moment, as I know, 
Will break asunder, crashing, heaved apart 
By bursting seeds of God's compelling spring, 
Temple on temple, arch on arch, 
All staggering down and whelmed 
In waters of eager thought, in flames of love. 
Against which day I neither lock nor loose 

59 



6o THE IDIOT 

Nor own nor will be owned within this doom 

That with a few others, unattached and free, 

My soul may cry: 

" Lo God, within this quickened earth 

Plow under the yearning heart which I have borne 

So many seasons, unfertile till You had sown ! " 

. . . Aye, 

The fool's way mine. 

Where is that Prophet crying within my heart? 



THESE fVERE 

THERE was a childhood once, 
And groping hands and feet that labored, 
Room after room, an old, evocative house; 
A youth whose urgent pinions beat 
The neighboring hills, to pass forever 
Their all-encircling borderland of sky; 
And there were people, travels, foreign lands. 
Adventure and love. 
These were . . . 
Blind potters of memory. 
Now, like an empty cup, I hold it forth 
To catch the vision . . . 
Drop by drop, 
Sparkle of living wine. 
I drain it . . . thought, deed and passion 
Met in this glory. 
Immortal. 



6i 



IMAGES D' AMOUR 



\X/H ETHER I was making salad in the blue bowl 
" ^ Or whether, beside the open window, I sat 
Leaning against the twilight — 
Bruskly, a storm amid my dreams, one entered, 
My brother. 

Speechless he stood and stared about him there 
As one whose thoughts are like a leaderless mob, 
Each tripping the next. 

His hands and eyes, the eyes and hands of a ghost, 
Twitched vainly at the veil of my repose ; 
And when at last he spoke 
I heard not his voice as words but moods, 
Moods pitching from angry fear to awed regret 
Like the stressed arpeggio of a violin: 
" Letters three I as a brother wrote, 
" And telegrams, unanswered one and all . . . 
" None knew where you had gone. 
" Why did you go? And why, O why come here 
"To this poor barren attic? 
" A monk's, a prisoner's or a madman's cell ! 
" What folly, what misfortune brought you here ? " 
Wonderingly I gazed at him so wistful, so far away, 
Beating desperately against the gate of my will. 
" Always, from a child, you leaned your ladder against 

a cloud, 
" And when the cloud drifted, you fell amidst the dirt. 

62 



IMAGES D' AMOUR 63 

"Speak!" 

" It was the earth drifted, not the cloud," I said. 

" But having promised the dead mother of us both 

" I came, and come again, 

" To bear you home, and wind the tired springs of your 

hope." 
" This is my home, the house of my soul," I said. 
Trembling, he seized my hand. 
"Come! I beg of you, come home!" 
Quietly I let a perfect silence flow about us, then 
"Look no more at the image of other minds; 
" Look once at me." 

Eye into eye, life into life deeply he gazed 
As one who sees his own bride in another's arms 
And feels his anger drown in fathomless regret. 
Despite himself, he stood beside me on the hill of my 

possession. 
" But you will let no harm befall you? 
" To me, first of all, you will come for aid ? 
"Please!" 

Insistently, not to be forded by speech, the silence 
Flowed sparkling between us. 
Weeping, he turned away. 

Once, when I too beat as a ghost against the gates, 
I too had wept and been as water in the cup of his desire, 
Who am no more a ghost 
Neither a coin jingled in the blind pocket, life. 



64 IMAGES D' AM OUR 

2 

Stiffly astare, 

The drowned corpse of that visit rises 

After nine days to float upon my thought: 

" A monk's, a prisoner's or a madmafi's cell! 

" What folly, what misfortune brought you here? " 
My attic, my little room 
Captured from the world's monotony ; 
My solitude, ransom of myriad souls! 
What blindness hangs before the friendliest eye! 
A room, an attic? ... 

'Twas rooms I fled from, prisons of visioning hearts. 
Now as in the freedom of all dream 
I camp upon the crossroads of the worlds ; 
The ages come and go ; 
Continents arise, dissolve; seas labor; 
Images, wrapt in glory, pause and speak; 
Or, if I will, there's nothing here at all 
Except the end of my thumb. 
Will the creator, and Desire the god 
Attend my moments ; 
But my will is to be free of every will; 
My desire to conquer all desire. 



Last night, following my impatient feet, 
I quit the vastness of the attic 



IMAGES D' AMOUR 65 

And entered in the city as a cave. 

With tunnels cut through human hopes denied 

It prisoned me in streets, 

And breasting the casual crowd 

I felt each man and woman thrusting forth 

His aura, stealing room from one another. 

None giving amplitude (where are those heroes 

Whose lives are amplitude about us?) 

Until I felt the river and the sky. 

A little star gleamed from the murky water: 

How like her life in mine, I said. 

Her life, bright perfect point remote, 

Yea worlds remote, yet faithfully contained 

In my own darkness! 

But does the star itself contain the river? 

Inscrutable shining star! 

Then, 

She leaned beside me on the brink, 

Both joining hands and lips .... 

Late, when the city slept, past darkened homes 

That were as lovers kept by grief apart, 

I crept to the attic, the river in my ears. 

Remembering. 



The clattering footsteps of my neighbor 

Up and down the stairs, impatient always for the street, 



66 IMAGES D' AM OUR 

Reluctant for the attic — the silence — 

They teach me 

I too, and more than sailor or soldier, 

Adventure! 

Here is my frontier, where salt and bread and water 

Change into the marvelous movements of hand and eye, 

Where movement becomes a thought, and thought a 

vision ; 
Here I adventure! 

Often, gazing at the bare wood of the table 
Showing its delicate veins, I stand abashed . . . 
The body of God. 
The body of God, given with open, tremulous hands and 

shining eyes 
In fire and earth and water which to me 
Murmur of glory streets and crowds betray: 
Of martyrs chanting sensuous, passionate joy 
Into the flame and smoke of bridal death ; 
Of sages brooding prayer in ancient forests ; 
Of children who gaze openly at the Word made flesh . . . 
A crucible, my attic; melting life 
Into the quivering elements, love and dream. 
Whence joyously I hang crucified between the two 

thieves 
Poverty and Sorrow. 



IMAGES D' AM OUR 67 



Sometimes I do not know if she or I be dead ; 

Which is the ghost, which is the living. 

I saw her thrice. . . 

The first time I grew conscious of the world, 

As if I'd drunken wine, the wine of dreams. 

As a flower I burst from the dead seed of myself 

Into the glory of life! 

And then, the second time . , . 

She was the glory. 

Once more (I felt the great arranger, fate, behind us) 

We met . . . and as it were by two wicks 

The candle of life took flame. 

Thrice, thrice . . . 

Yet as with closed eyes I see again 

Her eyes shining in mine, and with fingertips 

Trembling like conscious thoughts I know her warmth, 

There is a vibrance, a community 

Like speech of speechless children: 

She is near! 

Only, I too must die (or must she die?) 

To join her, where she fled. 

Meanwhile, I play at living in a world 

Whose toys blind hands have broken. 



68 IMAGES D'AMOUR 



Like atoms whirling in a drop, 

Atoms I mingled with, the crowd 

Stirred silently across the city square. 

Movements and moods passed above our heads, 

We striving to seize and fix our thoughts 

Blown from us, coals from a shallow pan. 

Then to me, wntless as the rest, the eyes of a woman 

And I knew nothing else beside their glow. 

It lit the world. 

Sunlight was darkness to it, shining with rapt calm 

Upon the souls of men. 

For the first time — souls/ 

Men I beheld as thoughts and not as features ; 

As fates, not bodies; 

As wills and not as forms. 

A whole city I perceived as a desert 

With never a drop of water nor a shady tree 

To nourish the leaf of life; 

A nation, prodigious with leagues and millions, 

Then I recalled as seven men and women 

Standing like carven giants on a hill. 

Or like actors silent upon a darkened stage, 

Their heads bowed, hands relaxed, 

Waiting the curtain. 

But she! her I absorbed as civilization 



IMAGES D' AMOUR 69 

Glowing with customs and arts, 

Laws, knowledges, cities, rivers, landscapes, monuments, 

Reverence for death and joy in living. 

I have forgotten the numbers and size of things in this 

world. 
Never shall I recall them! 

The crowd scattered ; the great mood like an ocean 
Drew to its ebb, but still the light shines . . . 
Men are the gardens to each others' seed; 
Men are the spring for each others' garden; 
Men are the dawn of each others' daytime! 
The dawn has broke ; forgotten thoughts and loves 
Walk like the blessed gods from soul to soul. 
Bearers of recognition. 
We return 

Even to the birth and the beginning of time, 
Children again made perfect in the womb. 



The perfume of her lingers about me, 
A garden under the level setting sun of Greece 
When, at the path's end, the gleaming marble 
Almost becomes the goddess. 

Goddess! what is this twilight which, creating you, 
Creates the darkness of your recession ? 



70 IMAGES D' AMOUR 

As the mild slipping of a child's steps I heard her 

Approach me; as the presence of a mother 

So she came ; speaking, it was the voice of my beloved. 

Kneeling beside my couch thus spoke my beloved: 

" Now at last is the returning of our love 

" From exile ; 

" Arise, for the thought of me is not dead. 

" Surely I have come of my own will, 

" Willing. 

" Between the worlds of being and appearance 

" Let our love dwell in peace. 

" There is an island rimmed by seas denied 

" Set like a pearl in the bright path of the sun. 

" There, which is the world's distance, be our future. 

" Arise, O my beloved." 

To whom, waking to her in the darkness of this world's 

midnight, 
Softly, speaking into the dawn, I answered: 
" Has not our future been, long ago, consummate? 
" The golden words of love, O my beloved, 
" These are but echoes. 

" Death does not intervene so much as living." 
But she, weeping, already withdrawing: 
" With all this I have not to do, 
"With brass and marble; 
" The empire of my heart shall it decay by time? " 



IMAGES D' AM OUR 71 

When, strangely ecstatic, I caressing the hands withdraw- 
ing: 
" Eifen by brass and marble shall I, toiling, 
"At last arrive! " 

As from a closing door I heard " Farewell ! " 
As to a door closed until the dawn I said: 
"Farewell!" 

About me lingers the perfume of her, 
A garden under the moon-disk, memory, 
Where, at the path's end, the gleaming marble 
Becomes the goddess. . . . 



LOVERS 

Peter, an old peasant 
Mara, his wife 
Anson, their son 
LoRNA, a young woman 

First Scene 

The interior of Peter's cottage. A fire of sod glows 
on the hearth. A table is set with cups and bowls and a 
loaf on a wooden plate. Three chairs are drawn up 
though only two places have been set. The outside door 
shakes uneasily in the violence of a storm, and the window 
rattles. Anson, his arm bandaged in a sling, sits on the 
floor beside the hearth, staring into the fire and oblivious 
of ivhat takes place in the room. Opposite him across 
the chimney-piece Peter is seated atvaiting supper, trou- 
bled and wistful, a spent pipe in his hand. Mara moves 
between the fire, the cupboard and the fable, preparing 
the meal. LoRNA, her hair shining ivith wet, has draivn 
a stool against the outside door. She seems to be listening 
to the rain, but occasionally ivatches Mara intently, as if 
she had never before seen a domestic woman at work. 

Mara 

[Startled by the wind^ 

Oh dear! Oh dear! 
It be the coming of the end of all things; 

72 



LOVERS 73 

I have the sure feeling now. 

Aye, hear the hateful wind and the rain ! 

They are but voices, like, and say what I always knew. 

Peter 

Don't be afeared for storms, Mara. 
You and me have passed many a worse. 

Mara 

Oh yes — have been enough of them ; 

But I always knew in my heart this thing would fall so. 

Peter 
Lies a path out somewhere, Mara. 

Mara 

\^Indignant^ 

Do you say so? 

What with Umber gone too, and none to help you ! 

But that's the way of it: 

Men look ever to their own betterment 

And leave others in want behind them. 

Peter 

Umber stayed through the sowing, Mara, 

And who can blame him for wanting to be a householder ? 



74 LOVERS 

MarX 

Oh, you never could, at all! 

You never could blame anybody, you're that easy. 

But I might have told you beforehand. 

I knew in my heart my life would fall so; 

I knew from the day my mother died and I had the 

family, 
Six small ones, always hungry and wild. 
My life would be a grief and a torment. 

Peter 

You were the good daughter to your father; 
The good wife you are to me, Mara. 
But I think we have been happier than most — 
Won't you just say so with me? 

Mara 

Say so, indeed! 

Harken now to me, Peter, what I will say to you ; 

Any time these thirty years I could have said the same. 

What I hold up to you now, 

This misfortune sent upon us, 

This bad luck in our old age! 

Peter 
How could you have said so, Mara? 



LOVERS 75 

Mara 

'Twas in my heart like a sorrow. 

I always expected the worst thing would come, 

As come it has. 

What can you say to that now, Peter? 

Peter 
[^Sobered^ 
You are right, Mara; 
'Tis like a prophecy come true. 

But I have been happy, aye, and looked for no trouble 
Beyond my power to right it or endure it. 

Mara 

That's j^our blindness, man. 

Men are blind — 'tis women who see things. 

There now! I suppose you will eat your supper? 

Peter 
Why, if it be ready . . . 

Mara 

You would eat the same were I cold in the barrow ! 
Peter 
[Taking his place at table] 
I think I would not take food that day, Mara. 



76 LOVERS 

[He breaks the loaf, hesitates, looks at Lorna doubt- 
fully, then at Mara] 

Well now . . . 

Mara 

[Angrily, wairhing him] 
Eat, man! Is the supper not good enough, I expect? 

Peter 
It is so, but I was thinking , . . 

LORNA 

Sit you, Mara. 

I will fetch the porridge from the fire. 

Mara 

Am I the woman will let another wait on my man ? 
'Tis the supper she is wanting for herself. 

Peter 
There is enough for her, Mara. 

Mara 
Aye, if she eat what be Anson's! 

[Full of this neu grievance, she takes a boivl from 
the cupboard, wipes it conscientiously and lays it 



LOVERS 77 

on the table. Lorna, undisturbed, brings a steam- 
ing pot jrom the fire and fills the bowl.} 

Peter 

[Perplexed] 

You be changed, Lorna. 

[They eat in silence. A spark snaps from the fire 
and burns on Anson's coat. Lorna extinguishes 
it carefully] 

Mara 

What are you doing to him? 

Seven days and nights I have cared for him, 

And never at all has he looked at me or smiled at me. 

He seems no longer my own son, at all. 

Peter 
Poor Anson. 

He has not wits for speaking and hearing 
And no will for eating. 
His mind is never with us now; 
I pray it not be wandering in darkness. 

Lorna 

Let him be. 'Tis the long fast of new things. 

Mara 
What witch's thing is that now? 



78 LOVERS 

Peter 

What was that word you put on him Lorna, — 
The new things? 

Lorna 

Aye, the true word ; I learnt it from the beasts. 
Mara 

And once he pushed me away! 

Me, his old mother, he did not want by him. 

What times and what ways are these, 

When mothers are struck by their children? 

Is he not mine altogether. 

My flesh and my blood ? 

He never did so before, never before! 

[She rocks back and forth, crying feebly^ 

No, he never crossed us before. 

Our will was his, as needs be in this world. 

Lorna 

What did you ever will for him 

Except to make him another like yourselves? 

But he is not like you, and must no more try to be. 

Mara 

What does she say, the strange woman? 



LOVERS 79 

Do not look at him so with those eyes ! 
What do you will for him? 

LORNA 

Nothing. Nothing and everything. 

His own will I will for him. 

I watch it creeping nearer and nearer 

Like a dream in the darkness. 

I watch, and can do nothing at all, 

Only wait, who never waited before. 

Peter 

[Touched by her sadness^ 
But you aren't such a bad woman, Lorna. 

LoRNA 

How should I be a bad woman, Peter? 

Peter 

But you were never as the others, Lorna. 

Lorna 
We be as God makes us ; 
And there is one only wrong, to change or be changed. 

Peter 
You say so, Lorna, 



8o LOVERS 

But for me a man is bad who destroys others, 

And a woman is bad who lives with too many or all alone. 

LORNA 

Oh, I have not lived alone! 

I have heard many voices speak 

Gentle and wise 

Out of the bright sky, 

Out of the deep wood, the grass. 

I have heard them since my mother went away, 

Whom I just remember, dimlike. 

I wandered out alone, looking for her. 

And she never came to me again 

But some one like her lives in the wood 

Who whispers many a word I understand. 

Oh, I never have been lonely! 

Peter 

Aren't you lonely now, Lorna? 

Did you not come here because you were lonely? 

Mara 

'Tis our Anson she wants, Peter! 

Lorna 

No, never your Anson! 



LOVERS 

Mara 

'Tis so! Let her not befool you, Peter! 
Oh dear, oh dear, 

I have no power over him since that day. 
Belike she has power over him. 

Peter 

She says 'tis not our Anson she wants, Mara. 
Perhaps you had some thoughts for a warm supper? 

Mara 
'Tis Anson, I tell you! 

Lorna 
'Tis the future and the new life, Peter. 

Mara 

There now! What is that but every girl's want? 

Peter 

Can you help him, Lorna? 

Give him wit for hearing and speaking, 

Make of him what he was before? 

Lorna 

Any woman can do that 
Who waits for his weakness. 



82 LOVERS 

Mara 

He pushed me awaj' when I brought the porridge! 
Peter 

Well now, Mara, if Lorna can do for him 
What we cannot do for him 
We'd best be thankful, eh? 

Mara 

Let her not touch him! 

What does she want but to make him follow her 
Into the woods and live with voices and things, 
Idle and selfish as she is? 

Lorna 
Let nobody touch him. 
Let us wait for him to come 
To you or to me, Mara. 
That is wisdom ; 

For surely if Anson be urged against his will. 
Even if he believe he comes by his own will. 
He comes only partly, 
And from her one day he will surely depart in anger. 

Mara 

Beguile men with that now, never a woman! 
Are you not both young together, 



LOVERS 83 

And will he not likelier come to you than to me? 
So need you but sit still with that yellow hair 
Before him when he awakes, 
But I must work for him and take him ! 

[//er voice rises shrill. Anson starts uneasily, mut- 
ters, and stands up. Mara draws near him, plead- 
ing without daring to touch him.] 

Anson, see yonder the warm supper. 

You will eat with us, Anson ? Oh yes. 

You W'ill sit down here, in your own place 

Between your father and mother. 

'Tis as if you had been far away. 

But now all things will be homelike, as they were. 

[Peter cries nervously, feeling a situation he cannot 
understand. Mara stirs the porridge and offers 
it to Anson. Lorna unbolts the door and flings 
it open. The storm has passed, the wind sighs 
away in the darkness; slow drops of water drip 
from the eaves. Anson leans forward searching 
his mother's eyes. She closes them, unable to meet 
his glance, but throws out her arms in deep hu- 
mility. Anson turns away and passes into the 
night without looking at Lorna or Peter. The 
three stand a moment with bated breath, then 
Lorna closes the door and leans against it, facing 
Mara.] 



84 LOVERS 

LORNA 

Have no fear and no anger, Mara, 

Though he has crossed the old threshold forever. 

I think it was not for myself I did this, 

No, nor even for Anson, 

But for . . . the voices and the wisdom. 

[^Mara chokes, unable to reply.} 

Peter 

[Sadly] 
I do not know him at all ; 
It is to you we must look for Anson now, Lorna. 

LORNA 

It may be so. I do not know the end yet, at all. 

Mara 

Oh yes, you bad woman and witch, 

You have stolen him for your own pleasure! 

A spell you put upon him, 

Hussy, foreigner! 

LoRNA 

I have put no spell on him, Peter, 

Do not think it. 

Did I want him to come that day? 

Ah no, but something new has fallen over us both ! 



LOVERS 85 

Peter 

You will not take him away, 
You will not change him, Lorna? 

LORNA 

Believe me, Peter, 

Anson will be nearer though far away; 

He will be more Anson, though another. 

This I will do for him 

Lest his agony depart without bringing renewal. 

\_She follows Anson. Mara sinks into a chair, cry- 
ing hopelessly. Peter, blindly hopeful and sym- 
pathetic, takes her in his arms and kisses her ten- 
derly.] 

Second Scene 

The forest at dawn. The austere twilight reveals a 
circular glade. A spring, half hidden beneath a rock 
and the sprawling roots of a tree, overflows with rain- 
suollen murmur. Here and there a vista of ghostly dis- 
tances opens through the trees. LoRNA and Anson enter 
the glade. 

LoRNA 

I stand at the door of the sun, 
I open the morning; 



86 LOVERS 

I hold apart the gate for one who climbed 
Seven days the lonely path, 
Leaving behind the things he hated 
To become the things he adored. 

Powers behind tree and tempest, 

Behind all that lives in freedom, 

Untamed, instinctive. 

You gather in me too intense for one to contain ! 

Pass out, pass over whither I will you. 

Pass with my love 

Into the soul that is near. 

Glad ! Glad ! Glad ! 

Pass with your moods and thoughts, 

Violently changing, making old ways new. 

\_To Ansonl 

Take freely the powers that come, ■ 
Your own, the self that you find 
Waiting under the dawn. 

Be strong and glad in the faith 

That you had forgotten, — 

Faith of things whole and changeless, compelling! 



LOVERS 87 

Be glad in tumult and riot; 
Be glad in darkness and silence, 
Glad in yourself and the world. 

\^She offers him water from the spring^^ 

Drink, lest jou turn back 

Dragged hy a bitter memory. 

Drink, that things past become like things reborn. 

Anson 

I stand within a cave that opens 
To the bright reaches of the sky, 
And see the heavens for the first time. 
God ! How beautiful we are ! 

Where do these paths lead that dance beneath me? 

What is this will that is not will but desire. 

Not desire but fulfillment? 

Thanks, thanks that I am born into this morning of time! 

Lorna, is it you? You have changed. 

The tiger has lain her to sleep. 

The fawn has awakened. 

O light that made my cave so dark I must destroy it! 

We two stand in a garden, 

Our garden, Lorna; 

Our garden that we will ?ow wjth many a delight. 



88 LOVERS 

Hush! A bird sings at the horizon of hearing. 

Hush! An echo — or is it the mate who replies? 

Who taught them our song? 

I listen, but the song is part of you and me. 

Come, pillow my head that I may sleep a little. 

I am a child too full of the day, 

Too full of wonder and growth, 

Ready for the sleep at last. 

What things we have to do, Lorna ! 

Think of them, how wonderful they are: 

None, since the beginnings of time have known how sweet! 

To make for ourselves a home 

Full of sweet thoughts and right wishes ; 

To lay out a meadow and field and a garden 

Where nobody ever turned a sod ; 

To dig for a sweet spring . . . the house all new, 

Yet not too far away . . . 

The poor, dear people, we'll teach them. 

IHe sinks down drowsily^ 

LORNA 

*Tis right now, to speak of a home 

Though I hated the women who grow old in homes, 

And the men who keep them in homes 

Prisoned from springtime. 

And said, never shall I forget and grow bitter! 



LOVERS 89 

But these too were claimed in joy — 

With happy thoughts they passed over the threshold. 

This is the gift of the world, — 

I too am born to-day, 

I too am grateful. 



TO A DANCER 

SCULPTOR of that most gracious theme, 
Yourself, 
You carve the galleries of remembrance 
Like Egypt, with a deathless attitude. 
Inscrutable figures, passing ever by 
In rhythmic file, yet ever, ever stayed . . . 
Behold, how hand outstretched to hand, they poise, 
The goddess and the victim and the bride, 
Your myriad moments . . . traced 
In bas-relief upon a poet's soul. 



90 



VICTORY 

THE sense of triumph slumbers deep 
And victory goes without a tongue 
For all the visible fanes we keep, 
For all our audible pteans sung. 

Unseen of eye, by ear unheard, 
It thrills to its own theme apart. 
The mind's unutterable Word 
And nameless Lover of the heart. 

From outward glory fugitive, 
Aloof from public fact and creed, 
Its hope is all the life we live. 
Its memory more than life indeed. 



91 



ILLUMINATION 



THE pride that darkens after victory 
Like mist upon the waters of the mind 
Parted, as though a sudden eagle passed 
Dipping a moment from the sun ; a light 
Shook down upon the waters audibly: 
' Who to himself and all the world appears 
Oracular, with speech of heaven and earth. 
But never from his couch before the map 
Has stirred a single pace, preferring ease! ' 
(O scorn of eagles, which have dared the sun!' 



Then silence ; but the waters of my thought. 
Bared to the brilliance, for a moment shone 
Like silver mirrors, facing from all sides, 
Inside and out. I gazed and saw myself 
Reflected in a thousand various forms: 
A beast, a tree, a stone, a cloud, a child. 
With thousand various images behind 
Of thought and deed and memory and mood. 
All moved, as they were troubled by a wind. 
But at the last were nothing. Then I fell 
Upon the knees that are no more my knees 
And with the voice that is no more my voice 
I cried a cry, the single thing I am, 

92 



ILLUMINATION 93 

As one will cry whose house has fallen down 
For help to raise the ruin and go free. 
And like the cry I fled outside myself 
And died like echo on the farthest hill. 



Like echo I had died, but now arise 

Like echo re-awakened by the song 

Of one who dwells upon the farthest hill. 



CREATION 
Post-Impressionist Poems 

(Paris, January— October, 1913) 



DEDICATION 

OGOD, Thou knowest I 
With what few things and slight, 
Form, music, colour and my power of words, 
Created heaven in this deathly place. 
Aye, as I struggled for the air I breathe 
And seized my bread and water from the earth 
By toil and pain, 

Thou knowest, God, I built a little heaven, 
An atmosphere, a dream 
More fixed than hills beside the ocean, 
Where I have lived content. 
God, if Thou hast not to struggle, 
If Thou art free in fact as I in dream, 
In will as I in hope, 

What larger heaven Thou hast built thyself! 
Sometimes within this cloudy mirror 
I glimpse it steadfast, and my passion hurts 
Like wounded birds in storm. 
O there shall I enter, — no, not enter, — 
But I shall make its equal, stone on stone, 
Thy watching architect, and dwell therein 
Godlike, in our good time. 



97 



THE VISION 

I CLIMB. 
The old spirit of the race, like hidden music, 
Tugs at my toiling feet and hands, 
Beats on my thought. I pause ; 

The uhole world dances to a strange sad measured tune. 
Baffled to reach sheer heights of silence 
I close my ears. The world shall dance, 
But dance from my own spirit's rhythm! 
Deafened, I climb. 

The old spirit of the race, dawn-mist. 
Taking a thousand lights and gleams, 
A sheen perceptible on peak and plain, 
Tangles the flow of river, the stillness of tree. 
The action of men in labour. 

Beauty! The spirit of the race proclaims. But I 
No longer perplexed, seeking the sun's pure blaze — 
Life's colour shall be the hues of my own dream! — 
I close my sight, and blinded, climb. 
Suddenly, gaining the utmost peak. 
Opening my eyes, I see beneath the sun 
United in an unguessed radiant glory 
The whole world changed, — created, re-created 
Mine, mine to love and know! And, 
Giving my ears and senses their desire, 
Silence at first, then slowly arising, 
The flux of musical rhythm swift and deep 
Binding all things in one tremendous march, 

99 



lOo THE VISION 

The glad progression of my conscious spirit! 
Now, kneeling in speechless wondering gratitude, 
Pierced through by free, creative wills and moods, 
I give myself to this, the common earth 
Redeemed, dissolved in my long-prayed-for vision! 

Men, rivers, trees: to you I turn again. 
Too strong for hate, too humble for doubt and fear. 
Descending from this peak of ecstasy 
To change your drugging music for this paean, 
To drive away your pestilent dangerous beauty 
For this renewing, soul-seen living sun! 



THE WELL BELOVED 

OTHE well beloved, 
Fortunate, fortunate men and women! 
They show the only authentic virtue 
Desirable in every race and clime: 
To be at home in one's own soul 
And comfortably fit, like a student's gown, 
The folds and wrinkles of one's nature. 

I love to fall upon one of them suddenly 
Just out the window, or round the corner, 
When I am vacant or grieving or hateful; 
I know them by a secret sympathy. 
And I go straightway healed, as by a spell. 
Strutting a little, hearty, bold, superb, — 
Spilling over, in short, as a man's life often should. 

I remember each of them I've seen: 
Such days are mirrors hung against my hope. 
There's one, now, leaned beside a mossy well, 
Dipping his fingers, lingering. 
Within his eyes I saw 
Continual amazement, the revelation 
Of sheer meanings in things blinked at, passed over, 

since, — 
Well, — Wordsworth, we'll say ; 
And one that followed a rebel mob all night 
To feel the human pulse at point of bursting. 
(And when he came again among us 
So strangely catholic, titan he, we stared in awe.) 

lOI 



I02 THE WELL BELOVED 

And one that stood before an antique desk 

Pondering old difficult words in a parchment book, 

Seldom turning a page, so deep he peered 

Into the lost childhood and mystery of time 

Glimmering through the philosophic Greek ; 

And then another (he too, an old, old man) 

Whose sweeping beard fell down and almost hid 

The tawny violin he pressed 

Rapturously to him, like a new mother ; and I waited 

Impatient for a fierce music to stab me ecstatic, 

(But he deeply, deeply listening 

To some old master or some grave inward tune 

Forgot me, though I coughed.) 

O, O the well beloved! 
Who taught them the true secret of being 
Over our heads who wait but hear it not? 
They never hurry, never disintegrate their souls, 
Fill the moment and the life-time richly up ; 
Grow to the time and place they find themselves 
Inevitably, like the weather. 
And seem to a casual passer-by 
The very spirit of the brook or forest, 
Its human symbol, its reality; 
Become the lordly genius of all knowledge 
That holds the piecemeal generations 
Fixed to a conscious, unifying will. 

They are not many, 



THE WELL BELOVED 103 

But where you meet but one or two 

There's the rare odour in the world's garden, 

The poignant taste in the soul's wine, — 

The essence that memory feeds upon, 

Sick of the common waste of life, 

To write a noble record or a joyous dream. 



IN A FACTORY 

OMOKY, monotonous rows 

^ Of half-unconscious men 

Serving, with lustreless glance and dreamless mind, 

The masterful machines ; 

These are the sons of herdsmen, hunters, 

Lords of the sunlit meadow, 

The lonely peak, 

The stirring shadow-haunted wood, — 

Of mariners who swung from sea to sea 

In carven ships 

And named the unknown world: 

Hunters, herdsmen, sailors, all 

By trade or chase or harvest 

Winning their substance 

Rudely, passionately like a worthy game 

With a boy's great zest of playing. 

O labour. 
Whoso makes thee an adventure 
Thrilling to the nervous core of life. 
He is the true Messiah, 
The world's Saviour, long-waited, long-wept-for. 



104 



IN A CAFE 



TTOW the grape leaps upward to life, 

•*- -*■ Thirsty for the sun ! 

Only a crushed handful, yet 

Laughing for its freedom from the dark 

It bubbles and spills itself, 

A little sparkling universe new-born. 

Well, higher within my blood and ecstasy 

You'll sunward rise, O grape. 

Than ever on the slow, laborious vine. 



105 



IN A CAFE 



T DRAIN it, then, 

*■ Wine o' the sun, sun-bright, 

And give it fuller life within my blood, 

A conscious life of richer thought and joy. 

And yet, — 

That too will perish soon like withered leaves 

Athirst for an ultimate sun 

Upon the soul's horizon. 

Come down, O God, even to me, 

And drain my being as I drank the grape, 

That I, this moment's perfect thing, 

Live so for ever. 



io6 



A GAUGUIN 

^ I "^O see, know, passionately take to heart 

■■■ The terrible beauty, in feature and in soul, 
Of one I heartily, heartily hate ; 
Then, possessed by her magnificence. 
Wholly become it, lover-like for the time, 
Create her perfect likeness, line and form, 
Conspicuous for the world's astartled wonder: 
This is the last mystery of art, — 
Moulding, with a strong, slow, hate-masterful hand, 
The delicate mask of some tormenting beauty. 



107 



A PASTEL 

YONDER the towered city, yonder the world . 
A heart-beat more, and surely from the East 
Another land will show 
Its delicate promise native to our joy 
Over the mauve and silver twilight: 
The soul of some remote, unguessed Japan. 



io8 



LES MORTS 

O TRANGELY between the darkness and my heart 

^ The lost eyes shine, 

And hands, fonder than all desire, 

Pass slowly on my hair and face. 

Whispers, arising from old depths of dream, 

Hover within my thought, awaking tears. 

How soft, 
How soft and tenderly clinging 
Pass the hands of the dead 
Over our hair in darkness. 

These are they that living we could not hold, 
That slipped like lustral water 
Out of our hands, away; 
And all our passion, all our desperate prayer 
Held them, O held them not. 



109 



MYTH 

GOD bless me! how that rascal time 
Keeps on his poet's tricks ! 

r the full daylight stare of trained historians and doctors, 

Under the very hands of modern bridge-builders, aero- 
plane-inventors and what-not. 

He's imperceptibly filled my heart with a new romantic 
myth 

Rich-flavoured as any tale Greek schoolboys heard 

On Attic slopes of a shepherd's holiday! 

Those boys grown up and changed, — those boys grown 
men? 

Freckles a City Mayor, three children, frock-coat and 
public title? 

(He swam our swimming pond three times across); 

Champion a judge, his car outside the court, 

Whom surely God designed a prime first baseman? 

And Hornet a clothes-importer, — prominent, etc. ? 

No, no! 

They are not men, like all these common lives, — 

I'll not believe it, though across the ocean 

Newspapers and letters mark their late success. 

No. 

If they are not still young, eternal boys. 

Their age has steeped itself in richer essence 

And turned them into joyous demigods. 

Their true life takes my memory like a myth 

Witnessed each day by the bright holiday sun, 

no 



MYTH III 

The glad, splashing river, the haunting odour of cherry 

blossoms, 
And my own faithful heart, that yearns — 
That yearns for demigods, not men. 



VALE 

T T ER eyes turn mutely, patiently 

■*- -■■ Like a hurt fawn's away, moist with a sense 

Of some great passionate faith or promise 

Broken, denied to the living-out of life. 

And in the muter stillness where they stand 

He sees as through an opened window 

The last petal from a well-loved bough 

Tremble and flutter down ; 

Hears, as from a neighbour orchard, 

A friendly throstle flute his parting tune, 

And suddenly, suddenly knows from her, from him. 

That spring itself, fleeing a stricken land. 

Has passed for ever. 



ENGLAND 

I GAZE upon the golden steaming hills, 
England ! and yield a grateful heart to thee. 
What! this cottage thatched against the sun, 
This April morning steeped in fallow glebe, 
And not an English heart broken in rapture 
To keep thee — England ? 
The Vandal poets wait against the coast 
To conquer thee and give the land a soul. 



113 



THE PLAIN WOMAN 

WHAT is the beauty of women? 
Listen ! — a song that makes the whole world sob 
Its aching heart away. 
But I? 

I am the silence closed about the song 
That keeps it beautiful. 



114 



EVERYMAN 

I CURSED,— she wept; 
And from her tears and broken heart 
Eden arose about me, and I stood 
Perfect within her beauty. 
God! how has that spirit hid unseen 
Behind the clods and hates of daily life? 



115 



THE LONELY CUP 

WITHIN the dusky room 
Betweenwhiles of the fire's insistent flap 
My silver spoon taps out 
Like startled sentinel's musket, 
The steaming tea 

Hisses against the cup like far-of^ rapids, 
Whirlpools of dim alarm . , . 
Impelled, I deeply gaze within the amethyst liquid 
Somehow become a globed, translucent fate. 
Shapes, colours, figures, dreams and deeds 
Create, conjoin, dissolve; 
Ideas, evolutions, histories, moods and souls 
Steam richly up and fill the empty room. 

No broken heart, no desolation. 
But life's vast wonder, changing, quick, intense,- 
A whole fellowship of things imminent and real, 
Portentous times to come, — sweetens for me 
The lonely cup. 



ii6 



SKYSCRAPERS 

A FOREST of strange palms 
■^ ^ That stir not, nor sway in the wind, 
Nor nod sleepy at evening, nor reach to nestling birds 
A warm and comfortable mossy bough ; 
Strange giant palms 

Rigid and sternly fixed in the purple sunset. 
One day the loud vexed ocean 
Will drive a furious tempest from the East 
To lash your stony trunks, 
To tear your earth-devouring roots 
And shake upon a shore deserted 
This terrible fruit of flame long petrified. 



117 



HOMEWARD 

THERE is no other bosom for a grown man 
To sob his whole heart-bursting grief upon 
Than the sweet motherhood of his own native race ; 
No voice to call him back from loneliness 
Than his own language, uttered from the first comfort- 

ings of love 
By the hushed lips of poets and faithful women 
Speaking into the great darkness 
That he, in his dark time, may turn homeward again 

and find 
The world's heart warmly near. 



ii8 



THE DANCE 

SLOW moonlight steeps the jungle-glade, 
And all the movement, all the pulse of night, 
Gathers within the hollow-sounding ocean. 
Long, melancholy waves 
Beat nature's avid life within my blood ; 
An essence slips from the still trees 
Pureeing my thought from dream. 
I rise, 

Feeling the air like womanhood about me. 
Arise and grope through silence to the moon, 
Then turn, sway, bow and pause again. 
Waiting the rhythm. 

Find me, sea-loud night ! 
Find me, for you are spent and old. 
I bring fresh heart and joyous consciousness 
Will give you speech, soul, freedom, thought, — 
Will tell the old, heroic He of life 
So gaily none will doubt for another age. 

The rhythm falls like women's passion 
Upon my lips, my hands; 
The world is sudden music and I dance, 
I dance, the soul of the lonely, moon-steeped glade, 
The thought, the freedom of the laboured sea, 
Swayed by a grace not mine 
In worship to a long-forgotten god. 
The womanhood of things closely and warm 
Presses my thrilling senses, 
119 



I20 THE DANCE 

Creating at my fingers and my eyes 

A vision, — Eve, all palpable and warm,— 

That beats upon my sobs 

And mates my life with passion. 

Eve! 

I come . . . O Eve! 

Then, like a setting moon, a storm subdued, 
The rhythm closes round about itself. 
Passing to secret consummation 
Beyond nature, farther out than thought. 
Lost even to heart-beats. 

And I, tossed by, forgotten, wingless to follow. 
Sink back into the apathetic darkness 
With earth's ten million years, 
Into the prison-house of tree and ocean. 
Eve. . . . 



THE CROWD 

FED from the gloom of night-strewn barren streets 
And gorged from the gloomier night of barren homes, 
The heavy, corpulent crowd 
Enormously sprawls the house of carnival. 
Mute as a foeless, mateless sea-deep monster 
Heaving through livid, phosphorescent caves 
Its bulk of terrible hunger seeking prey. 
As one great staring Thing the brutal crowd. 
Passion-distended, 

Rolls ponderously out its whole slow length. 
The avid, pitiless will of huddled men 
Absorbing into one vapid, bottomless soul 
Its long-craved prey of pleasure. 

The dancers flutter, dazzling Its vacant eye ; 
These girls with shining trays of heaped fruit 
And wines from the world's mad reckless south 
Steep drowsily Its wandering senses; 
Deafened by changing music. It grows partly glad. 
How did I come a part of this huge Thing, 
Myself so harmless? 

Yet I too fled from my own hateful gloom, 
From many a biting sorrow, 
Gladly forgetting myself and others 
To surge with these the warm sleek blazing house. 
The house of carnival. 

So the monster dies. Its bloated power 
Dissolves in tears. I look and deeply know 



122 THE CROWD 

The secret parts, like me, of the corpulent Thing, 
The avid men and women of the crowd. 
And O these dancing girls, this glittering fruit 
The Thing glutted Its empty heart upon, 
'Twas all the broken pieces of old joy, 
The fragments of our man and woman dream 
Which, blindly coming together, 
We sought amid these changing lights and sounds 
To take, to gather up, fragment by fragment. 
And shape into one conscious soul again. 
I, when the rear gate of my life opens, 
From all such tragic hypocritic days 
Shall turn to the far mountain of my secret will. 
That stark, still place, to build a small cottage there 
Beside a whispering brook, 
To sit alone and think of many things. 



THE EGOIST 

"OHE has no soul. 

^ Her almond eyes diminish to a spark 
And change the sun to amber. 
When she looks at me 
I draw without myself and pass, unwilled, 
The strange lids of her eyes, and enter 
A garden that knows no law, 
Sowed with imaginations like a god's. 
I enter and become 
Another self, drunken 
By new thoughts and hot-pulsed danger. 
I long to sing, to prove my madness, 
Dancing away from habit. 
Responsibility and the grave laws of soul. 
A woman has no right to perilous thoughts. 
She has no soul, and O, 
I lose my own, and all my satisfied past, 
Desiring her." 



123 



THEY 

SHE, with smile of wrinkled stone, 
Watched Lola dance. 

Like naked flames 

Blown dazzling by a masterful wind 

Frantic with conflagration, leaping on 

To seize intolerable smokeless heights; 

Like branches, laurel and bay, 

Gently, soberly borne by virgin girls 

In white procession 

To lay upon some holy monument; 

Like stars that light through storm 

Astonishing the soul — 

Two stars above the rushing tempest poised 

Her hair, her limbs, her eyes: 

O God ! how Lola danced ! 

He 

Wearied a little, gray before his time, 
Polite, attentive . . . apathetic . . . 
Quickened, knew within his blood 
Suddenly the old adventure; 
Within his thought 

The tense, creative pull and tingle of life — 
The vision — 

Knew himself in Lola, and leaned 
124 



THEY 125 



With eyes and heart and will 

To seize this marvel 

And make its essence eternally his own. 

She, with smile of wrinkled stone, 
Watched Lola dance. 



HERTHA 

EXQUISITE to her slow silk's rustle 
Nay its echo 
Who save one hate-tortured might say how perfect 
This woman's silken and perfumed exquisite 
Feminine beauty? 



126 



THE GIRL 

SHE plagues me with the rapture of my sex; 
I bring her flowers and kisses, 
I breathe her hair 
And dream against her breasts; 
I splash her limbs with water from a pool. 
Then, inspired to something of my manhood, 
I sing to her, and to myself, a song. 
The song of Eve : 
But frightened she laughs aloud 
And runs and hides within the sleepy wood. 
I follow, sobbing. 



127 



THE ENCOUNTER 

POOR shivering girl, 
All eyes 
That swim in timid wonder, 
Hungry, forlorn, street-corner girl, 
How the stupid world has starved her! 
Stay, I will give her riches, — 
Not bread and wine and pearls, 
(Those eyes were never starved for bread alone!) 
But love, soft kisses, ardent words 
And fellow-admiration ; these 
Will lid her lidless eyes, restore her soul 
To vacant lip and bosom. 
She 

Will lie as summer dawn within my heart, 
And moonlight on my imagination. 



128 



THE BLUE GIRL 

O HE does not walk, like me ; 

^^ She swims, an undulation, a perfumed water, 

Changing, changing. 

When she is gone I try to think of her. 

But dream and all desire turn inward, empty, — 

Her passing burns no steadfast line upon my vision 

To recreate her beauty from. 

Beauty, like life itself, lost in its own rhythm. 

Perfume and water. 

Others I could dream of, and loved my dream far 

more than woman. 
She alone I must have, the beautiful. 
Like perfumed water, flowing, flowing. 



129 



EVE'S LAMENT 

WHEN I first stopped, dismayed, and wept, 
Caught in the tangled vines, at the world's 
wildness, 
You swiftly came, O Adam, 
Heartily bade me wait, and singing gaily 
Hewed through the crowded jungle growth a way. 
Lonely I waited by the cave, afraid 
You never should return ; but you returned. 
And standing upright in the dim home-twilight, 
Kissed me, and loved me safe. 

Then, when I wept once more 
For rivers to be crossed and hills laid low 
And the great ocean to be governed, 
You heartily bade me wait, and while I waited, 
Lonely and desolate at home. 
You, Adam, pushed your might against the hills 
And laid them low ; 

Pondered a moment by the swollen streams 
And bridged them ; 

Flung ships across the white, rebellious seas, 
And governed to your will the tide and storm. 
But, each adventure done, you hastened 
Searching for Eve, and ever as you came 
Brought the glad bold heart that stirred my heart, 
Strong manhood to my womanhood so warm, — 
Adventure to my adventure, — 
130 



EVE'S LAMENT 131 

That, united in our twilit chamber, 

We laughed for contentment, lapped in vision. 

Never the task too hard, 

Never the way too long. 

But you returned, O Adam, 

Joyous to me. 

Now, in a moody night 

I looked upon the stars, wept forlorn, 

Lost within their infinite mocking spaces, 

Their soulless tangle, — wept, and cried aloud 

To save my spirit slipping, slipping away. 

The boy-heart swelled within you, 

You bade me wait a little, then sped 

Out to the solitary hills, 

Down in the dripping pits 

Pondering, and groping and dreaming, 

To measure them, to master them, for me. 

So long, so long I waited, 

Grown cold with barren terror; 

Yet, turned thus upon myself 

My womanhood awoke more fiercely, 

Steeped richer passion in my heart, 

Made me more lovely than a dream. 

Desirable and warm. 

And I danced, dreaming of your return, 



132 EVE'S LAMENT 

Adventure to match adventure, 
Vision to match your vision ; 

Then 

You homeward crept, O Adam, 

Dragged by unconscious habit, like a worm, 

And stumbled upon the threshold empty-eyed. 

Dumbly you sit apart 

Amazed by the cold frame of things 

As one stricken by a mortal inward fear; 

And all my passion spilled upon your lips, 

And all my trembling silence 

Has not restored your boyish mirth. 

Has not reflamed your eyes, melted your heart. 

Given your cosmic space a human feature 

Nor saved me from this modern widowhood. 



EVE 

WHY have you hid yourself, O Eve, 
Among these laughing girls, 
And why are you divided. Womanhood, 
Among these anxious women? 
There is no world for me. 
But only silent hills and empty woods. 
And restless seas and rivers. 
And lights of sun and star 
That bear their barren torches up and down. 
And only seasons, storms and holidays ; 
No soul, but only thoughts and moods 
And self-tormenting dreams. 
Until we mate, O Eve, 

And gather all these fragment-worlds and lives 
Into our large and procreant passion. 



133 



GHOSTS 

T F you have never lain 

■*• Against the passion of a poet's heart 

In his great hour, 

Created by his triumph to a queen 

And known the world beneath you ; 

Girl, 
Go straightway to a far, deserted hill 
And cry, with arms outflung, 
That you are dead, not living, — 
Aye, mock the sun 
And call the world a dream; 
Pray fiercely for birth 

With words and gestures such as ghosts employ 
Beneath the grave 
(For you are one with them!), — 
Do so 

And I, whose hour passed on 
Without the mating heart, the comrade arms, 
The poet loneliest in his vision, — I 
Will follow you, O girl, 
And mingle with your bitterest sob 
Silence less sweet. 



134 



EVE'S DAUGHTER 

YOU have tamed me, O 
Eve's daughter ! 
The promise of veiled eyes, 
The passion of newly opened arms. 
Breasts' opulence at twilight, — 
All the vision I sought to mould of life 
(The man-dream, womanhood), — 
You tenderly seize, you change, Eve's daughter. 
All womanhood is you. Eve's daughter. 
And touched by you with something still and far, 
An awe, remote as stars. 
Eyes shine with new promise. 
Arms' passion creates a new desire, a longing 
To enter life's unravishable heart 
You, only you can still. 
O, you have tamed me, child. 
Eve's daughter . . . and mine. 



135 



LOVE 

** I ""HIS is the way, O girl, of love divine 

■■■ That men and women, rooted in earth's soil 
With trees and dogs, ignore: 
My conscious and abundant passion 
For life in God, 

Directed by your unawakened beauty, 
Pours out in ardent words and warm embraces, 
And stirs the soul within you : 
Aye, I give you soul, new life and being 
From my abundance, — 
Wake you in stainless, masterful ecstasy 
From your long earthly sleep ; 
And you arise, conscious, grateful, devoted 
{In love as blind hearts say). 
Then, the steep wave spent. 
My head upon your lap, my hands relaxed, 
A great emptiness where I had hailed my soul, 
You, O conscious girl, 
Will know to render me a soul again 
With ardent hands and voice, with joyous will, 
And I shall rise 

Your mate, restored against your need. 
Ah, amid the ruin of all worlds and lives, 
Our being shall not fail. 
Nay, 
We two shall live for ever. 



136 



SOULS 

WOMEN 
Brightness of many limbs and wondering eyes 
A calm still garden : dawn : leaves that slowly 
Yield to sleepy breezes: glimmering fountains 
Painting barbaric colours black and gold 
On peering faces — 
Odours that steep the essence of magic 
Dream of infinite passion to be — 
Women 

Women unwearily keeping their beauty perfect 
Sheltered in shady gardens 
Limbs and breasts and eyes — 

Suddenly 
Crashing forgotten gates in thunderous war-song 
Men, thrust by desire: hands outstretching: enter 
Naked as thev. 



137 



THE DREAMER 

GOD the Father in His easy chair pondering the 
great book of Vision 
Lets fall a casual hand the while He broods tremen- 
dously the word; 
And on his little stool beside the human child, restless 

for play, 
Takes the slack fingers in his busy grasp. 
Fondles them, tracing the great grave philosophic lines 

and wrinkles 
And rubs his cheek against the palm, kissing it all over 

with a sudden fondness ; 
But fallen from his little stool, and crying aloud. 
Pulls at the casual Hand and whimpers for a word, a 

glance. 
All in vain, now and for ever; 
For God the Father is quite lost in the terrible endless 

Vision, 
And from the height whereon He broods sunk in His 

easy chair, 
Only the casual Hand falls down, the slack, forgetful 

fingers, 
Tear-wet or kissed, gently relax, nor close the Book, nor 

lift the child. 



138 



O BRUTES AND DREAMERS! 

COULD it not be 
That God, turning His essence outward 
Upon our world to search the things we know and live 

among 
For some creation corresponding to His being, 
Might see, when ranging these stars and worlds. 
These ponderous, slow, impenetrable shapes, 
Nothing, — nothing? 

In all these forms that stop and prison us 
Only a void wherethrough .His glances pass 
Without resulting image? 

Could it not be 
That all our universe to Him is unsubstantial, 
Unreal, inane? 

And, passing from thence (which is nowhere) to us, 
These active, self-impressing souls, their moods and 

states. 
Their terrible energy of good and evil. 
These also make no image on His thought, — 
Not even echo, shadow, memory? 

But, wherever a vision-caught spirit of man 
In self-oblivious loyalty labours on 
This outer world, endows it with his vision, 
Changes its substance, pierces it with moods 
Humanized, aspiring, — there 
God pauses, closelier turns and knows 
(Not in the shaping soul or shapen world 

139 



I40 O BRUTES AND DREAMERS! 

But in their perfect union), 
An actual thing at hist, a correspondence, 
Essence materialized. Himself attained. 
The one reality in space and time? — 

Could that not be, O brutes and dreamers, 
Say! 



REVEILLE 

WHETHER the conscious world, 
Girt round by hate and wrong and terror, 
Desperately defend itself 

As a few brave guards and watchful captains 
Maintain about some lone remote fortress 
A small circle of troubled peace; 
Or whether, ourselves a blind anarchy. 
We vainly pit our selfishness and fear 
Against a whole outer universe of law, 
Admitting across the frontier from time to time 
Enough of God's terrible order and justice 
To burn a small torch amid our inward gloom — 
Ah, when shall we raise our battle-blinded eyes 
Above this endless conflict we wage 
Life by life, for a mere breathing-space and foothold,- 
Heart-knit, soul-united once both East and West 
Thrilled by the energy of a mutual dream. 
Take heed and know if brute or Prophet hold 
True mirror of the attributes of man. 



141 



BEFORE A GAUGUIN 

T ESCAPE from all them that hold me; 

■*■ The prisons and the strong stockades of love, 

The deep pits of hatred, let me go. 

I pass on perforce from name to name. 

Assume new qualities and titles 

Sewed and patched on for the day's need 

From old definitions proudly fitting once 

But soiled, rent and tawdry long since 

Like the heaped regalia of long unfashionable kings. 

I pass on, escape even from myself. . 

The swiftest mood and widest embracing thought 

Reel from my eager tortuous progression. 

Nay, the whole world grins 

Knowingly from its mask of good and evil ; 

Murderers, in utmost pity, droop before their judge, 

And for the sake of the world's masquerade 

Dive willingly into the black mud of stigma. 

Otherwise . . . 

But we are all anarchists 

Stumbling brave and blind through a strange lost region 

Bordering the stupendous ecstasy of life. 



142 



THE HILL 

BE not too certain, life! 
(Or is that power of death, that tedious power 
Which with insistent sneer 
Shatters continually and steeps in slime 
The difficult house I raise. 
The house of consciousness?) — 
Be not too certain of me; 
Deem me not wholly tamed. 
Content with labour ineffectual 
Upon this ruined house of thought ; 
Or, turning to things outside. 

Content to hurry a life-time through these streets 
Darkened with vaster ineffectiveness 
Even this sea-flung, sea-swift fog 
Makes so pathetic romance of! 

Count not too long upon my slavehood ! 
For as I have often dreamed. 
There is a hill 

Sloping against the dizzy, mystic sky 
Whither, in a moment, I can go. 

There is a hill 
And, pausing for courageous breath 
Pace after pace I'll climb 
Fleeing from thee, O insufficient life, 
A weak yet conscious Christ 
Bearing his cross of aspiration. 
O, bleeding and gasping on that hill 
143 



144 THE HILL 

To me the vision of things 

Already perfect, consummated, present 

Sudden will rise, and I shall thrill 

With powers you know not of, 

Old tedious world of streets, 

Inevitable failure, self-deception, 

Death-in-life ; 

For, writhing as I might be 

In supreme pain, and broken 

Upon the wheel of dissolution, 

Never was so great aspiration void ; 

And I shall wholly triumph 

Convinced at last of my own perfect soul, 

And God, the soul's desire. 



AN OLD PRAYER RES A ID 

IS it too much to seek 
Among the hving, one friend, one man or woman 
To stand ever between me and the blinding glory of God, 
Mirroring the pure flame to my weak eyes 
And visibly to every humble sense 
Showing the glory? 
Too much to seek? 
Is there not one among the breathing 
Who like the demigods of old 

Mythed to a people's heart the manner and the way, 
Will draw my thought and passion from itself, 
Make me forget the dangerous mystery. Soul, 
Wholly admiring, wholly intent upon a great nature 
Heroic, tender and calm? 

I drive my prayer along the crowded street 
But meet only a passionate, willful race 
Or here and there a wistful fellow pilgrim ; 
And all the while the immanent, pitiless glory of God 
Burdens and breaks my heart. 



145 



IN THE MIRROR 

T HAVE not dared to be alone 

"*■ These many months, but passed with all the world, 

A driven ghost, through the black magic 

That we call life ; till now 

My mirror suddenly bids me halt. 

Before its dimly lighted depths I pause 

Seeking the image I have known, serene, heroic, 

Dwelling for me within the m3'sterious glass, 

The I . . . 

Lost, lost these fearful, hurried, wasted days. 

Now islanded about by silence. 

Poised safe upon the twilight 

Alone, intent, thrice-conscious, 

I dare again, I will . . . and 

Convinced, convincingly 

Out of the glooms of my disparted self 

It starts, it gathers, 

Shines from the mirror, throbs within my heart; 

And gladder than any warrior-ravished bride 

My song of triumph flows . . . 

Loving the world and by all things adored. 



146 



PILGRIM 

HOW often, paused before some brilliant name 
Shining b}^ thought or will; 
Or glimpsing a modern chief 
Serenely intent 

Upon his purpose undefinable, — 
How often the shadow of ourselves 
Projects far forward 
Even to touch the titan we admire, 
When, heart-leaping, soul-conscious, 
Thither, we say, the distance to traverse, 
Thither the summit we must still attain. 
Our consciousness is never to itself 
Sufficient and content. 
But ever seems 

A pilgrim thrust upon an endless way. 
Toiling to reach 

Some ultimate shrine of self contained in self. 
The road of life winds upward, upward, 
Gathering all types and natures 
Into one fate, 
Linking the brute to God. 
Never a day 

Opens our eyes and minds to a new sun 
But, thrilled by fear or joy 
Excessively intense 
And startled from ourselves, 

We recognize a way that winds in our own soul, 
147 



148 PILGRIM 

Bidding us follow. 

And, looking beyond, 

We find nor end, nor pause, nor quiet, 

Only the road that winds 

Upward and upward, 

And the great compulsion of time and change 

Goads us along the dizzy, myriad days. 

Even death, we feel, but plants new pilgrim feet 

Upon the ancient upward pilgrim way. 

O, disheartened we lean 

Upon our staff of the soul's self-recognition, 

Pondering the interminable road 

And our own worldly burden. 

The road of life winds upward, upward. 
Strewn with disheartened pilgrims 
Even as you and I. 

Yet, when we will to yield, 

Dismayed by the cold, bleak summits of time, 

And toil no more, 

Leaving perfection to a tougher soul, — 

Content to pause midway 

With broken staff, closed eyes, and folded hands, 

(A little slumber, O narcotic sleep!), — 

Then, opening eyes. 

After the moment's frantic oblivion, 

Then has the landscape changed 



PILGRIM 149 

Unwilled, untoiled-for: 

By no labour, no conscious pilgrimage of self 

Our soul has gained ascent. 

New vistas arise 

With pleasurable moods 

And, for a little, time has lost its dread. 

Then first do we confess a power 
Beyond our conscious purpose 
Filling the universe of men and things; 
Changing, replacing, creating. 
At once here, before us and behind. 
Planning itself a pilgrimage so vast 
That our supreme success would make it fail. 
There is a power 
Not to be sought, but seeking; 
Holding, not to be held ; 
Using, not to be employed ; 
Ignoring, not mocking personality. 
Shaping the fragments of men and things 
Into an order and perfection not our own. 
Life is the climber-up! 
Life is the pilgrim! 

We but a part of the road he treads upon 
Mounting the cloud-piled hill! 

So, being not the climber but the climbed. 
Not the eternal pilgrim but the way, 



150 PILGRIM 

I come to find myself 

Circled by a great confidence and peace. 

No more shall I attempt, 

Blindly afraid, to seize 

His garment or sandal, and stay 

Life, the creative, unstaying; 

No more shall I perplex and madden 

My sensitive thought 

With torment of a sheer, heart-breaking hill; 

Nay, but thankfully aware 

At last, and not too late, 

How rightly fits my nature to the world, 

Learn to live fully, gratefully within 

The perfect here and now 

Which life, from full-brimmed pilgrim's wallet. 

Tosses each soul in passing 

Upward and upward 

On his mysterious way. 

Pass freely along, O life, 
God's pilgrim. 
Godspeed! I speed, I release thee! 



PARADOX 

IF I praise death, I feel it by the genius of life: 
If I praise life, I speak it within the ears of death. 



151 



FRAGMENT 

THEIR eyes shine, the rapt boy-gleam that never be- 
fore 
Poured out the hearts of strong, world-toughened men, — 
Shine, and eagerly turn 
The one way, Wesward, 
So many arrows cleaving a single mark ; 
And like the wheat in windy acres tossing 
Their limbs reach forth 

The one way, Westward, all their ardent hands. 
Their ardent hands and feet, one rapid, impetuous rhythm 
Tosses them, swaying, advancing. 

The tapestries of kings superb in battle 

Bore never so rich design. 

Nor rugs that ancient faith made intricate 

Visioning the fervent soul. 

As here 

These dancing feet, the citizenship of earth. 

Responsive, passionate, trace 

Unconsciously along the echoing street. 

I follow. 
I join them. 

Closer, closer I press me, 
Body and spirit 
Urged to the central core 

Of this new passion warming, transforming men. 

152 



FRAGMENT 153 

Like a strong man bearing proudly aloft his burden 

Our slow, deep-rolling voices 

Carry to heaven a grave and mighty hymn. 

We reach to the world's edges 

Gathering all men and women, 

Uniting them, creating to one titanic, puissant nature 

The myriad moods and passions of the race. 

Not one avoids or declines us, impetuously receiving 

In deepest heart the mutual rapture 

Bursting at last the swart frontiers 

Of nations, races, hatreds of class and clan. 

No master to lead us, 

No slave to follow; 

PVe go. 



JANUS 

ttnpHERE! 

A Look where the blazing star reels down 
To sudden death in some mean stagnant water — 
That, O friend, is signal to the doom 
Rushing upon a world, a fair, dear world 
That dies almost unmourned. But I 
Die with it in my heart." 

My silence questioned him. 
"A world, — how shall I tell it? 
So calm, so gracious? Well, 
It lay in little villages apart 
Like secrets in a lover's memory; 
In villages where family names and deeds 
Survived, creating magnanimity; 
And there were albums, birthdays, festivals; 
And old men grave, old women queenly ; 
And night enframed each leisurely day in gold ; 
Poets were read and known; 
Slow organs breathed along the shadowy street; 
And manners were thought the better part of men ; 
October twilight, — God ! it seemed as though 
History itself, and all the human race. 
Had come each autumn to its perfect fruitage. 

Friend, believe me, a fair, dear world lies dead." 
Moved by his measured sadness 
I rose to score the dead world's epitaph 
On starkest rock by distant hills unknown 

154 



JANUS 155 

Where some strayed reveller of future times 

Might chance upon it, and had he a soul, 

Lament the passing of a kingly race. 

But even as I rose I felt about me 

The new world shaping in the ancient wreck ; 

That modern vision of life, — city-haste 

But with it city-plenitude ; and souls 

Created by the tenser rhythm of crowds ; 

No long-maturing names, but freer men ; 

And roads hewn out like equatorial belts 

From race to race ; 

And cloud-lost aeroplanes ; colossal ships ; 

Long inter-racial tasks, to unify 

A million labourers in a single dream; 

New words, terms, thoughts, — the conscious mind 

Reached out atiptoe, startled by its wealth ; 

New dreams, of art and peace, 

Advanced by stouter hearts than Caesar's; 

I felt this world in labour, and I knew 

Not death, but birth, had agonized my souL 



CREATOR 

GOD looked at me ... a woman's eyes 
Piercing through and beyond 
As there were nothing here, — 

Nothing, where this heart beats, where this mind labours! 
Now the whole daylong I stand 
Lost in this strange nothingness, 
Seeking . . . 

As a shadow might seek the hand that cast it, 
As an echo might seek its sound, 
... A soul. 

I have been with them who run hither and thither 
Before the antique silence of a church, 
Who kneel at carved dark altars 
And sniff wantonly the heady incense; 
They are like those who guard a forgotten fortress, 
Defending a frontier no hostile army ever will attack. 
Long ago a vigorous Life passed by 
Making terrible battle of being against non-being. 
His memory lingers, and these 
Proud of their strategy and their courage 
Take arms and stand before his fading footprints in due 

array. 
The sun glitters on their new swords and buttons. 
And death, their only foe. 
Steals up and crushes them beneath the burden of their 

unused armour! 
May I cast this lie utterly away, 

156 



CREATOR 157 

Creep out from this entanglejnent of memory, 

Stamp underfoot the secondhand experience men term soul. 

This is the lie that fetters the world. 

All men save thieves and artists mix its poison with their 

daily bread. 
Soul never existed before, 

Will never exist until I give it being in and by myself. 
There is no type, no model ; 

No path worn sleek by generations of dragging knees 
Can lead me to its place. 

It is a chaotic nothingness round about my life, 
Flesh with my hand and eye, thought with my thought; 
It whirls past my finger-tips, 
Hides beyond my swiftest imagination. 
Here in its midst I stand 
Lonely as no mortal ever was before, 
Confronting it, stern, anguished, half-daunted, 
Waiting for the great mood gathering power within me. 
Soon shall I leap forward for the last time. 
Seize the chaos with all my being, godlike, 
Creatively shape it into a perfect spirit, self. 
Or fall back prostrate, knowing myself no better than 
dogs and trees. 
The blatant legions of triumphant hell 
Swing past with reckless booty. 
What faith, what sureness of the daily life! 
God looked at me. . . . 



CREATION 

NATURE'S truant and scapegoat. 
When I was made the earth held back her flame, 
Mixed no prodigious sulphur with my blood; 
Said : Here's one must beg or steal his life 
Day by day; I'll give him nothing mine. 
How long I crouched apart; 
How long I hated the ample-winged birds, 
Envied the sturdy oxen, the swift hound, the painless tree. 
When a man passed I wept, bewildered. 
How long I begged of water its ease. 
Of wind its lightness, of fire its passion. 
I crouched apart from laughter and tears; 
Love I knew not, only I knew that hearts with sulphurous 

blood 
Beat grief and rapture through all lives but mine. 
All else is perfect; nothing am I, I said. 

Then, like a tiny puff of wind on the great sea 
Thickened by obdurate calm, 
A prayer, a feeble spirit-breath sighed within me. 
My hand tightened as for a titan task. 
I gazed at it, bewildered. 
Said: Nay, another suffering begins; 
Now while the burden of storm and season 
And men and things harries the gable of life, 
A cunninger spite steals in beside the hearth 
To pester the feeble flame. 
But, stirring again my thick obdurate calm, 

158 



CREATION 159 

The prayer increased. 

My breath drew deep, as for the dance of passion. 

What is this? I cried. 

Stronger, stronger it heaved and whirled and swirled. 

I could not crouch, I rose, I stood erect. 

Clenched hand, drew breath. 

Impelled by some new sense not mine, yet mine, 

I leaned swiftly to myself, as to heaped inarticulate clay, 

Moulded the mass to likeness of a dream. 

Fondled the outline to a wondrous curve. 

Gave eyes, ears, breath. 

Hasten, said God: not so in a thousand years 
Shall man create himself. 
Swifter I laboured, singing. 
Then when the shape fairly answered my desire, 
Answered, contained the vision of things perfect, 
I in my feeble days painfully descried, 
I entered in, assumed it as my own. 

Nature's scapegoat ! 
While men and beasts drag the burden of nature, 
Her being, loved for her sake, not their own, 
Her need their passion, her desire their power, 
I stand apart with God 
And brood upon the world behind this dream. 



ECSTASY 

OLAST, unassailable perfect triumph of life, 
The very signal of attained being to avidest men: 
When the bound, slow-groping panting soul 
Abruptly risen to freedom, joyously perceptive 
In presence of some unexpected beautiful thing, 
Cries out to perish. 

To die all through straightway, and nevermore be, — 
Unless, unless, it be the universe itself, 
Container of all space and time. 
Container of that very moment of sweet anguish. 
That very death-life cry and the mad, rent spirit ; 
Container of itself — as the opulent spring contains 
One clear, articulate bird — as the unpartisan year 
One season of spring whose pomp, whose passing alike 
Inspires no pride, no awe — returning again. 

How the life-filled spirit of man, 
In its great moment, knows and envies God. 



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GOAL 

/^VER my head bowed in the passing of the soul's first 
^^ rapture 

The day burns calmly and sloiu pressed in its brazen bowl 
Like incense peacefully consumed by shrines where few 

men ivorship; 
Odours arising drift and catch at my weary senses, 
Wakening an inner power my will, my courage never 

inspired. 
Without ash the day burns out, without pollution; calmly 

and slow 
The day in its brazen boivl consumes the perfuj7ied ash of 

yesterday. 
Mingled in one strange maddening odour the incense of 

the passing moment 
Restores the old, forgotten years. All time returns, a 

strange perfume. 
To-morrow so shall burn, and its to-morrow. No moment 

wastes and none 
Sinks to ashes in the boivl that calmly burns all life aivay. 
My will, my name, my love, my soul consume; O God, 

at last I am. 



THE END 



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